The game is called Ingress and it intended to be free to play globally. The story of the game is about two sides battling for a new power source. On the one hand we have the Enlightened, who are trying to take control of people’s minds through portals all around the world, and on the other we have the Resistance, who are trying to stop them.

Ingress runs in the form of a free mobile app that is available for download on the Google Play store to your favourite Android device. The way to play the game is to link portals together to create protected zones or to play on the other team and try to break those links.

Watch the promo video of Ingress here.

Portals are located in real-life landmarks and players use their phone’s maps to check-in at as many portals as possible, some including retailers and brands. Players can also walk along designated paths to pick up energy to make their characters stronger.

Some people are thinking that the game may be a way of crowd-sourcing to gather mapping data for Google Maps. Whatever the case, I’m quite interested to see how the game plays out.

The game is a closed-beta, which means that currently you will have to register yourself at the Ingress website and get an invite code to play. So far I am still waiting for my invite code, but I can’t wait to try out the game.

The idea behind this Kickstarter project, ‘Zombies, Run!’ is simple: it aims to combine real world running with a zombie video game. The game works by giving you, the player, instructions through your headphones.

You accept missions and run around IRL while listening to the game unfold through your headphones. Medicine, ammo, batteries and spare parts can be collected and used to build and expand your base, through distance waypoints.

Missions are expected to last around 20 to 30 minutes each and there is going to be over 30 unique missions in the first season of the game.

The aim of the game is to make running even better with a game and story and targeted to everyone, from the casual jogger to marathon runners. ‘Zombies, Run!’ can work anywhere, in a park, along the beach, in the city and apparently even on treadmills.

The route is completely up to the player; there are no specific direction orders given, so no worries about having to stare at the screen or changing your favourite jogging route to follow the game.

Items that are automatically picked up during the course of the game can be distributed among your base, and the larger your base, the more missions you have access to.

This sounds like a really interesting game, especially since it does seem to motivate people to run. I usually listen to my favourite podcasts when I go for my jogs, but this sounds like an even better incentive to get me running!

The augmented reality experiment is made of the old fiberglass and wood cabinet of the arcade game that is mounted onto an electric golf cart. The cart’s motors, wheels and drive train were carefully concealed beneath the arcade cabinet.

The build doesn’t run on the original 68k processor of the original game, but instead runs on custom software. It works by taking video data from the real world through two webcams mounted on top of the cabinet. The images are converted into game sprites and displayed on the monitor.

As for the speed of the vehicle, the software changes it proportionately according to how fast you are going in the cart. Of course, the cart’s top speed is only a breezy 13 miles per hour (about 20 Km/h).

Creators of the game believe that the technology behind it can be used in other innovations, including using it to help those who are wheelchair-bound. Sounds really interesting from something born out of a game.

Check out a video presentation of the game here.

Perhaps this technology also can be used to help blind people to drive by providing sensory feedback of some sort when there are obstacles detected. It’s definitely an interesting experiment, no doubt.

This year, he has come up with ‘Snowball Blaster’.

The objective is to dodge snowballs hurling towards the sleigh you are controlling. Sounds like a simple game, but it certainly makes for a really impressive light show. Even your scores are counted for each snowball you’ve dodged (though they are not logged). For those who are able to get all the way through to the end of the game, they are rewarded for with a big light show. (Though according to Turner, no one has made it yet)

View the video here to see the game in action.

The audio to the game is also broadcast through FM so that people who pass by in their cars can get a good show too.

I can’t wait to see what Turner has in store for next year. It’ll probably be as impressive as this year’s game, no doubt.

Lyscho has taken a hollow ottoman with a lid, and has built a makeshift cockpit out of an old car seat, reverse-mounted pedals, steering wheel and gearstick peripherals. The cockpit is also fully adjustable to accommodate people with shorter or longer legs, with the seat, gearstick and steering wheel that can be slid forward and locked down.

The total dimensions of the ottoman/cockpit is only 1500mm x 500mm x 500mm.

I think this is awesome. It’s cheap (well, not counting the peripherals, but if you already have those on hand, it’s pretty inexpensive) and it certainly gets the job done. It even saves you space and doubles as perfectly usable furniture. Best of all, it takes very little time to assemble and disassemble, and you don’t have all your peripherals cluttering up your living room floor. This is as close as it comes to having a real car simulator in your living room.

Blurring the line between video games and reality is certainly nothing new, with the Roomba Pacman and the 6-string Guitar Controller, so it might not come as such a surprise that someone has brought this racing game to life.

German designer Malte Jehmlich and company created this real-life rendition of Wipeout with just a webcam, an R/C car and a race-track made of cardboard.

The speed mimics the PlayStation original due to the scale speed of the 1/28 model R/C car. Controlling of the game is done through an arcade racing cabinet that comes complete with a stearing wheel and an on screen display that is wirelessly connected to an Arduino board. The idea started out as a 2 month hobby project and it is now being worked towards an advanced version. The designers are planning to build sensors right into the track to allow for force feedback and powerups.

Sounds like an amazing plan. I wonder it could be expanded to create a new form of gaming or will it stay as a novelty item? Even if it did stay as a novelty, I would love to try playing it!

Watch the video and see for yourself this twist of a racing game.

Watch the RACER DEMO video game mashup in Vimeo

Update: Latest Cinematic Trailer just released on Jul 21, 2010 by Blizzard:

For some, July 27, 2010 is the most important day in the calendar; for the last few years and maybe more.

For others – that means those of you who has been too busy working to remember 1998 when StarCraft was released, this article is full of videos that will take you back to those days when we used to rule the galaxy with our buddies, and all we do is go Zerg or Protoss hunting. Ah, those were the days!

Even as I am writing this, people who bought the digital version of the game are already downloading it, waiting for the game to be officially released on July 27 in order to be able to install it. These people want to be ahead of the digital queue! This digital queue is much better than the one you see at an Apple product launch or the one when Star Wars Episode I just got released. For one thing, you don’t have to sleep overnight on site to be the first. All you gotta do is wait. The bad thing is – the waiting can kill you …

So while waiting, why not take a peek at the game requirements provided by Blizzard, to release some tension, and also to watch and re-watch some videos to get us in the mood:

This is the StarCraft II Official Cinematic Trailer from 3 years ago, for those of you who has not seen it yet:

7 mins of gameplay footage from StarCraft2 single player campaign:

Starcraft II Beta Tournament: David Kim vs Tyler on Lost Temple Part 1 and 2:

Game Requirements:

Windows Specs:

Windows Minimum Game Requirements*:

Operating System: Windows® XP SP3 |Windows Vista® SP1 |Windows® 7 (All having the latest Service Packs) with DirectX® 9.0c
Processor: 2.6 GHz Pentium® IV or equivalent AMD Athlon® processor
Graphics: 128 MB PCIe NVIDIA® GeForce® 6600 GT |ATI Radeon® 9800 PRO video card or better
Hard Drive: 12 GB available HD space
Memory: 1 GB RAM (XP) OR 1.5 GB (Windows Vista® |Windows® 7 users)
DVD-ROM drive
Broadband connection
1024X720 minimum display resolution

Windows Recommended Game Requirements*:

Operating System: Windows Vista® SP1 |Windows® 7 (With the latest Service Packs)
Processor: Dual Core 2.4Ghz Processor
Graphics: 512 MB NVIDIA® GeForce® 8800 GTX |ATI Radeon® HD 3870 or better
Memory: 2 GB RAM

Macintosh Specs:

Mac Minimum Game Requirements*:
Operating System: Mac® OS X 10.5.8, 10.6.2 or newer
Processor: Intel® Processor
Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce® 8600M GT |ATI Radeon® X1600 or better
Hard Drive: 12 GB available HD space
Memory: 2 GB Ram
DVD-ROM drive
Broadband connection
1024X720 minimum display resolution

Mac Recommended Game Requirements*:

Operating System: Intel® Core 2 Duo processor
Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce® 9600M GT |ATI Radeon® HD 4670 or better
Memory: 4 GB system RAM

*Note: Subject to changes by Blizzard by the time the game is released. It is correct as of Jul 16, 2010.

The Official StarCraft II in-game demo from 3 years ago. If you have seen this in 2007, you will want to see it again to compare how different the game is now compared to then:

Hell, It’s About Time!

Calling all you Star Wars fans out there!

You all know that Star Wars has given the world much needed inspiration not just in entertainment, but also all sorts of technology including robotics, laser and even toy technology.

You will be pleased to know that Hasbro is organizing a Toy & Games Carnival this weekend on 29-30 may 2010, to be held at Cineleisure Mall:
Time: 12 – 9pm
Place: Centre Atrium, Cineleisure, The Curve

There will be Starship Battle Games, Lightsabre Wielding Competition and more, with over RM10,000 worth of prizes and giveaways!

Download Flyer
Download Itinery

Check out Hasbro’s 70% Toy Sale – Star Wars, Transformers & Marvel Comics…

May the force be with you!

A few months ago, Ubisoft, embarked on a quest to develop a new proprietary digital rights management system designed to protect their intellectual property from the rampant piracy activities that traditionally plague the PC gaming market. The new system will be unlike anything ever tested before and they claim it will bring about a new era in DRM.

Piracy has always been the bane of computer software. Ever since the early days when software is distributed in the form of diskettes, there have been many schemes devised to try and defeat the pirates. It started off with cards that you have to consult in order to get the correct password to input into the game/software when you start it and evolved into CD-checking mechanisms that will only allow a game to run if the proper legitimate disc is detected in the CD-ROM drive.

Every step of the way, pirates have cracked all these schemes, sometimes with embarrassing speed. It seems that nothing could really work.

That’s when Ubisoft decided that based on the proliferation of high speed Internet, a new DRM should be developed to take advantage of this fact. They released the first ever game, Assassin’s Creed II, to feature their new overhauled DRM protection scheme which requires players to stay connected on the Internet in order to play the game.

The system is little more than a challenge-response protection, albeit with an online component which makes it harder for pirates to crack. The way this works is, at key points of the game, it will send out a challenge to a Ubisoft server which then replies with a key. If this key passes the game’s check, you are allowed to continue. Otherwise, the screen will blank out and you can’t play the game.

When pirates discovered how the system worked, they quickly got around to creating a Server Emulator designed to intercept requests made by the game and redirect it to a ‘dummy’ server installed on the computer. However, without the proper challenge-response keys, the game remains uncracked.

The next stage was to get the keys. The pirates enlisted help from people who bought original copies of the game to run a little app that monitors the challenge-response requests to and from the game and capture the matching keys. Eventually, legitimate users of Assassin’s Creed II users managed to capture some 1700 keys necessary for the game to be completed in a few weeks.

Even more damning, a month after the debut of this new ‘persistent online DRM’, SKIDROW, a popular cracking group, has finally cracked the game and disabled the entire copy protection mechanism allowing you to play the game without having to mess around with a server emulator and getting the proper keys to unlock the game.

The ball is back into Ubisoft’s court as to how they will proceed with this now neutered system. However the victims are still legitimate owners of the  game who are forced to jump through hoops in order to play their games while pirates continue to enjoy their games without having obtrusive and obnoxious DRM forced down their throats. Admittedly, intellectual property owners reserve a right to protect their properties, but it seems that there is no easy way to do it without inconveniencing legitimate owners of the game. The game of cat and mouse continues…

This particular problem is quite nasty. It only happened to me recently and here are some tips to overcome it, although it cannot be 100% solved.

Your computer may be suffering from this malaise without you being aware of it.

Recently I noticed that my computer has slowed down considerably. The problem was particularly acute when I was playing a certain Facebook Flash game in Google Chrome. Blaming the problem on an unoptimized Flash game running on Google Chrome, I did not bother fixing it until it got more severe. Okay – until a cute female friend asked for my help…. that’s when I decided that it’s really a problem worth looking into

The Cause

So I ran the game in Firefox and Internet Explorer and found out that the problem is not any fault of Google’s. Investigating further, I finally followed the trail to some sites where people congregated and compared notes on Adobe Flash 9 and 10, like this one here.

And I found out that there are so many tormented souls like me out there!

Others have noticed this sluggishness running Youtube videos. These people have 3 GHz cpus and 4 GB memory but they have the same problem. Youtube is known to work fine in mobile devices running Firefox in only 256MB of available memory space – try googling Nokia N900 – so it cannot be due to people’s computer being old and unable to deal with Adobe’s Flash requirements.

Many have speculated that Adobe Flash’s resource hogging is due to Adobe Flash being a poorly written program, with unoptimized code. Some even say that this is a new version of the Microsoft-Intel conspiracy theory where these giant corporations worked together, to get us to fork out more of our hard-earned money so that we have to buy more computers and help the IT industry prosper.

The Fix:

1. Uninstall Adobe Flash

Really important! You can skip step 2 but not this!

2. Get the beta version, Adobe Flash 10.1 Beta.

If you don’t want to run this beta version, then reinstall the current version at http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/. Just remember NOT to get the free McAfee security app.

After the uninstalling and reinstalling, I find that my Facebook game is more responsive now – my friend says hers is playable now and my Facebook gaming life has improved – I get to spend as little time on it as possible

I won’t say that it’s 100% solved – I still notice that Adobe Flash leaks memory frequently in Firefox and Google Chrome. To resolve this, feel free to restart the slow responding browser or wait for my next article on how to identify and close the memory leak.

Hopefully, this short guide here can solve your problem. If not, then your problem may be a different one or is more severe than this and I can’t really help you but direct you to this article and see for yourself that you are not alone in this.

Happy gaming!