The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for the kitchen, garage and backyard from food to furniture to fun & games for your family.
GBADev has an annual competition to create home brewed GameBoy games. Instead of giving out cash and flash cartridges the aim is to manufacture a batch of 500 cartridges with the top entries (a “multi-cart”) complete with cart sticker, manual and box. The cartridges will be manufactured by an “independent party” (not Nintendo). The cartridges are in, you can order them now. The games look great. Link.
Lots of things to put on your PSP. Here are official PSP versions of comics formatted for the PSP from Variance press (High and Lonesome, Last Orders and Semantics). Next up- Star Charts resized just for the PSP from the Mag-7 Star Atlas project, love this! And lastly, pimp out your PSP case- I hope someone makes a template and kit to do this. Link. Thanks Eric!
You know those hilarious/ridiculous singing animatronic mounted fish? Marty Vona gives full instructions for how to make one utter any audio you want, based on a $9 chipcorder and a $7 microcontroller. Link.
GameSpy has a great article about Spore and the new way to think about games. Will Wright, creator of SimCity and The Sims talks about his latest game where you become a cosmic creator. Here’s a great quote…“At the same time, what he calls the “value to gamers” levels off after a while. A game with 22,000 animations isn’t twice as good as a game with 11,000 animations. But fortunately, Wright learned another lesson from The Sims: People love to make their own content. They love to customize their experience…Putting two and two together, Wright concluded that there had to be some way where users could create content, instead of armies of developers, and a way to make a game craft itself around the user’s contribution”. I need this game.
Scary Terry’s Halloween pages has some cool projects using wiper motors that look like a lot of fun. Rocking a chair, kicking legs and dancing skeletons. Although it’s a bit too early for Halloween I’m going to start picking some motors up over the next few months to get ready to totally freak out the kids this October. Have any Halloween projects you’re thinking of doing? Let us know!
Editor-in-Chief Mark Frauenfelder on innovation and the entertainment industry’s efforts to squelch it.
Imagine this: Your car battery is dead, and you’re stuck in the woods. Your mission: Get home before you freeze to death.
