6/3/2008 - The Game Boy Camera Webcam

For every hit product Nintendo releases there are as many forgettable products they would like to bury under the rug. Most of them are peripherals like R.O.B. the Robot, the Gameboy Card Reader, and the Super Scope 6. There was a product that got swept under the sand, but only because it did not live up to its true potential. The Gameboy Camera was a little camera that attached to the Gameboy and could take black and white stills whose quality left much to be desired. There was also a Gameboy Printer accessory that you could get if you wanted a printout of your photos.

All of it was fairly useless other than the aspect of providing a cheap way for kids to get into digital cameras (they were quite expensive back then). However, there was talk about a potential use of the camera that would have made it a must buy. It was sometime before the GoldenEye follow up Perfect Dark was released, and a magazine article said that you could somehow transfer headshots taken with the Gameboy camera and use them as face textures on the characters! Think about it... you could literally be in the game by taking a picture of yourself and transferring the image to the character somehow. This would have made the first-person shooter a whole lot more "first-person", don't you think? Imagine deathmatches where you are literally seeing the face of the person you are playing against and blowing them up with a rocket launcher!

Alas, they never released this feature. I'm not sure if there was an official reason given as to why not, but most believe that Nintendo did not want to get sued if you were putting an image of your school teacher on a character that would be used for target practice. And even though there are video camera peripherals for the XBox 360 and the PS3, they aren't being used for custom face textures of characters. One can only assume that they agree with Nintendo's reasoning for excluding such a feature. That really is a shame for us gamers though.

Even though the Gameboy camera is mostly useless, one creative techie was able to make a webcam out of it. Why? It's just another case of "because I can":

1/17/2008 - Tekken 3 [psx4iphone 0.1.0]

Now here's something I didn't expect to see on the iPhone... a full Playstation emulator on it! If you thought the NES emulator on the iPhone was impressive, this will knock your socks off. Yes, it has a pretty bad framerate, but it's just the first version. Now, you may ask, "why not just get a PSP"? Well, that's certainly a way to fulfill your desire to play Playstation on the go, but can you also play Gameboy games on it? How about NES games? Of course not. That's why the idea of having these emulators on the iPhone is great (if you're willing to skate on the edge of legality).



Boy, I can't wait for the official SDK to come out next month so we can see all sorts of these kinds of programs for the iPhone/iPod Touch. It's fair to say that it would be hard to control a game with a virtual control pad as shown here, but once there's an official way for developers to write applications for the iPhone and interact with the hardware, I can imagine someone creating a dockable add-on for the iPhone with physical controller buttons. Something like that could make the iPhone a true mobile gaming platform. Watch out, Nintendo and Sony!

5/6/2007 - Tetris Ninjas

I got one of the original Gameboys when it first came out, and yes, it was a frickin' brick! It was supposed to be a shrunken-down NES that you could fit into your pocket. The only thing is, if you had pants with pockets THAT BIG, you'd probably be beaten up! I'm really surprised it became a hit. It was bulky, black & white, and could not handle fast-moving graphics (everything would blur like crazy). After dropping it once, my screen would have one or two columns of pixels that became missing. Also, I got tired of it eating my AA batteries so I got an external battery pack that completely destroyed the Gameboy's portability.

It did have one thing going for it, though, and that was the pack-in game Tetris. When I first heard that a puzzle game was going to be the pack-in instead of Super Mario Land, I was scratching my head. Why would Nintendo be shooting themselves in their foot like this? The original NES packed in Super Mario Bros., and Nintendo made gaming history with it. I didn't have a PC, so I did not know anything about this Tetris phenomenon. I thought that it might have been some kind of edutainment thing that would bore me to tears. Boy, was I wrong!

The beauty of Tetris (and of other good puzzle games) is that it's so deceptively simple. Complete lines with falling blocks? Sure it sounds easy, and it is at first. As the pace gets quicker, you'll see how your hand-eye coordination skills come into play. In Game A, you're trying to outdo your High Score. In Game B, though, you're trying to complete a set number of lines with random blocks in the way at startup. You weren't any kind of a Tetris guru until you beat Game B, Level 9, High 5. It's still hard for me this day. What was cool was that you'd actually get an ending! Looking back on it now, it was correct for Nintendo to have Tetris as a pack-in game. It was fun, addictive, and its graphics were so simple that the Gameboy blurriness wasn't a factor at all.

Seeing Tetris as a skit in the Boston 2007 Anime convention has definitely brought back some flashbacks. They got every little detail right, including the music tracks (my favorite was Music-1, though) and the pause screen. The folks that come up with these skits never cease to amaze me!