Unveiled yesterday at The Education Show in Birmingham, what you’re looking at here is Worcestershire-based company Elonex‘s answer to the Asus Eee – called, simply, One. It’s no secret around these parts that I’m a bit of an Eee Fanboy, although I’ve managed to resist buying one so far thanks to the insane stock shortages they’ve been suffering.

The Elonex One shares the Eee’s 7″ screen, but has a detachable splashproof keyboard for pseudo-tablet usage, 128MB of RAM as standard, and 1GB of flash storage. It runs on a Linux distribution reportedly based on Debian and is available in black, white, silver, pink, or green.

I’m going to keep my eye on this one – maybe it’ll turn out to be just as lovable and hackable as the Eee – but at this price you can hardly go wrong, can you?

If you want an even better look, there’s even a video of it on the BBC website. The One will be released later this year for £99, and Elonex are currently accepting preorders at £10 each.

This, ladies and gentlemen, this, is Ireland’s entry for this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. It’s a turkey, called Dustin, rapping about how Ireland should get “Douze Pointe” from everyone else in the contest.

No, I am not joking.

Have the Irish finally flipped? Have they decided that Europe has had enough of their usual cheesy ballads? Or is this some kind of strange Irish humour that I don’t understand?

Still, it’s probably better than the English entry will be.

Yes, This Is A Real Type Of Crab. F*** Me.

Oooh, now this sounds like a great idea – a game centered around those creepy little crustaceans known as crabs, mainly, the catching of said critters. No, I don’t mean that kind of crabs, the kind you get from a hooker in Amsterdam – I mean the type that live in the sea in Alaska.

Silly.

Of course, it’s really not worth writing an entire post for the sake of one, admittedly pretty lame, joke (the one about catching crabs, in case you missed it), so I guess I’d better give some actual information. There’s a lot, so these are some of the highlights from IGN’s exclusive report:

• The game is a laugh-a-minute, featuring such fun activities as battling 40-foot waves, storms, ice, and a “nearly 100-percent crew injury rate”.
• The game has been in development since October 2005, so it’s probably better than Duke Nukem Forever.
• No better way to sum this one up, so a quote’ll do: “…Deadliest Catch Alaskan Storm is an immersive and challenging experience, putting [you] at the helm of one the world’s most dangerous jobs — that of a crab boat captain in the icy Bering Sea”.
• Get your hands all over your very own crab-catching vessel – the player gets a choice from one of five real crab boats, or can create their own dream crabber!
• 34,000 miles of real coastline painstakingly recreated for your crab fishing pleasure, with the most realistic wave effects ever seen. In any game. Ever.
• …And much much more, including the fascinatingly-titled “skiff racing minigame”.

So, if you like the idea of catching crabs yourself, for research purposes or for your own twisted pleasure, and “skiff racing” sounds like your kind of scene, you could do worse than to check out Deadliest Catch: Alaskan Storm, coming to Xbox 360 this April.

Finally, I pat myself on the back for resisting the urge to mention Giant Enemy Crabs here, as two lame jokes in one story would probably create some kind of terrifying, universe-devouring paradox.

D’oh.

A little survey has just appeared over on the Epic website. It’s asking a few questions about the best bits of Gears Of War, and as the title of the thing is “GOW 2 Survey”, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that they’re taking all this into consideration with the design of GoW2.

So, if you have a Windows Live ID (Hint: If you have Xbox Live, you do), head on over there and make your voice heard. You never know, your suggestions might just help to shape Gears Of War 2 in a very good way. Also, they’ll be posting the results of the survey on the site in a few weeks!

It’s just a shame there’s no option to suggest the mighty traingun.

A music game in mono is like a picture without colour!

Today Activision have finally caved in over Guitar Hero 3 for the Nintendo Wii, and have announced that in addition to the disc replacement scheme they were running, that they will now offer a full refund to anybody who owns the faulty Wii version. Although that is replacement OR refund, not both.

The fiasco stemmed form the rather poor sound quality of the Wii version. Some super sluthing later and the boffins in the interwebs had worked out that the sound from the game was only in mono, not stereo. Is that really an issue I hear you cry? Well imagine 2 player GH with all the mistakes coming from both speakers… How lame would that be? I personally suspect it had to do with one of the sound channels being assigned to the wiimote speaker, but I don’t think they have confirmed any reason yet…

Obligatory links here for Activison’s press release, the form to request a replacement disc and the form to request a refund.

This past Wednesday I finally managed to get my hands on a game I’ve been waiting absolutely ages for – the Xbox Live Arcade version of N, known as N+. It’s the latest incarnation of a cult classic free desktop game, which I was introduced to nearly two years ago by fellow teabagger OwningXylophone. I don’t know if he was a big fan or if he’d just heard the news that it’d be coming to XBLA, but that doesn’t really matter – what matters is that I’ve had it on my work PC and my computer at home ever since.-

Bouncy Blocks Are Tempting, But Will Probably Bounce You Straight Into Those Mines.

This game is an awesome timewaster, a game so simple to pick up and play, and yet so incredibly, ridiculously difficult to master. If you have a short attention span or a short temper, this game can be both a blessing and a curse – a lot of levels can be charged through in a matter of seconds, and a lot require a carefully timed, choreographed combination of moves to pull off. N is one hell of a clever game.

But what is it?

Well, if you hadn’t already guessed, it’s an honest, good old-fashioned platformer. It does, however, forego the completely unnecessary story that goes along with most platformers, replacing it with a ninja and lots of jumping. The ninja needs to collect gold to increase his time limit, and to hit a switch and exit through a door at the end of every level. That’s it.

But the beauty of this game is in the physics, the timing, and the excellent level design. Most of the levels can be completed in a multitude of different ways, and with each run being timed, but the amount of gold collected increasing your time (which is a good thing), the straight dash to the exit isn’t necessarily the best way.

Some levels are frustrating and will take half an hour to an hour to master, while some are a complete walk in the park – but all of them are fun, intelligent, and well thought out.

These Blue Things Amble Around And Zap You.

The XBLA version brings with it an excellent co-op mode, online race and survival modes (which should be fairly self explanatory), a level editor (for drawing a big cock and balls for your ninja to jump around on), and a meaty selection of 450 levels, with more coming along in future. We also get a rather 1980s menu system, which will bring a tear to the eye of any nostalgic 8-bit gamer, and a similarly old-skool chiptune soundtrack.

I can highly, highly recommend this game – in fact, I think it’s one of the best games on the Xbox Live Arcade. If you’re at all unsure and don’t think that my recommendation is enough (pah!) you can always play the lovely free PC version and make your own mind up. It’s available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The XBLA demo itself is excellent, and the entire game is only a 13MB download so there’s really no excuse, even if you don’t have the hard drive.

N+ is available now on Xbox Live Arcade for 800 points.

Take A Little Trip, Take A Little Trip, Take A Little Trip With Me…

Check it homes, this be one bad ride fo shizzle. Looks like grampa’s tricked out his wack-ass ride with the help of this very gangsta’ issue of Modern Mechanix Magazine, circa 1933, and now he’s cruisin’ big time on his twenty-fo’s.

Okay, so I have absolutely no idea how to be gangsta’, but then again, your average reader of Modern Mechanix back in 1933 probably had even less of an idea what they were getting themselves into when they followed this “build a comedy Ford” guide. If only they knew.

Apparently, it can be used to “give thrilling joy rides around the town”, as your average 1930′s gentleman was wont to do.

(via)

It’s been a little while since any of us posted a “What am I Playing?”, so here’s one to catch up on what’s entertained me for the last few weeks.

Dawn of War

An epic battle unfolds on a frozen wasteland

For anybody who is not familiar with the ‘Dawn of War‘ series, it is a real time strategy game on the PC, based on Games Workshop’s ‘Warhammer 40,000‘ universe. With it’s 2 expansions, Winter Assault and Dark Crusade, it has most of the races from the tabletop game covered, the only notable exception being the Tyranids. The game plays like most RTS games, you gather resources, build up your base, build an army, go destroy! The difference to most being that the resources you are gathering come from capturing and holding strategic points around the battlefield, not sending a pleb to gather them from some field. You can also zoom all the way down and watch the carnage unfold from the view of your Space Marines, which can be fun when the Bloodthirster runs in! Also worth noting on the gameplay is the inclusion of squad caps, meaning your army has a finite maximum size, and some units cost more cap count than others, i.e a squad of standard Space Marines costs 2 squad cap, but a squad of Terminators cost 3.

I have to say, I think this is possibly the best RTS game that I’ve ever played! Maybe it’s because of my roots in all those fantasy tabletop games, maybe it’s because you have a choice of 7 races (9 when the new expansion comes out next month!), or maybe it’s because of Relic’s previous game – the truly awesome ‘Impossible Creatures‘… Whatever the reason, if you enjoy RTS games I’d highly recommend this game! It’s also nice to see a game that is 3 and a half years old still getting new expansions, that’s some dedication from Relic!

Fatal Inertia

The Unreal III engine in action again!

This is one of the many games I won in ‘Aceybongos Gamerscore Challenge‘ last year, and I’m finally getting around to playing it. Made by Keoi, this is the fist game they have made for the 360 that is not part of their Dynasty/Samurai Warrior series. The game is a physics heavy racing game in hovering ships, with your weapon pick-ups really playing on the physics part… There’s magnets that weigh your opponents down, there’s the rocket that attaches to your opponent wing and start forcing him into barrel rolls or the cable that can be used to tie two opponents together or tie one opponent to the ground. The game is split up into 4 race championships, split over 3 difficulty levels. The better you do in each championship, the more upgrades you unlock for your cars, but there is no way to restart a single race in a championship, so you have to do all 4 back to back regardless of how badly you do! No cheeky restart here! The game isn’t too bad, but does get a bit repetitive towards the end and it contains more than a few parts that will make you want to throw your controller at the wall!

N+

My brain hurts!

‘N+’ is the XBLA version of the free PC game ‘N’. Basically, you are a stick figure ninja who has to jump around a room to avoid the traps and hit the switch to open the door and escape. Sounds pointless, crap and stupid? Well it pretty much is, except it’s more addictive than ‘Heroin Hero’! Plus you can create awesome levels on the level editor, like my room of death, of Mr. Geekboys, err, cock and balls! Really, if you have never heard of or played ‘N’, then download the free PC version, get hooked and then go download ‘N+’ for some good achievement loving!

Better keep that box in original condition…

And there we have it…The end of an era. Goodbye HD DVD, we knew ye well!

Microsoft have released an announcement stating that they will no longer be manufacturing HD DVD drives for the 360, so if you’d like to make a small fortune on ebay in 20 years’ time, stock up now. OK, so that part wasn’t actually in the announcement, but you know how these things go.

At least they’ll be providing support and warranty repairs on existing drives for the foreseeable future. I guess that as Toshiba, most of the Hollywood studios, and now Microsoft themselves have dropped support for HD DVD, we can officially call this format war over – that can only be a good thing.

So long live Video Marketplace!

And, er, dare I say it, Blu-Ray!

A lot of people seem to think that the Mac isn’t very good for games. Well, for the most part they’d probably be right (although the ability to run Windows these days kind of eliminates that problem), but in the case of emulators for all your old favourites, this couldn’t be further from the truth. There are emulators for lots of classic systems available for OS X, and today I’m going to show you how to install and configure MacMAME, the Mac version of everyone’s favourite old arcade emulator.

For the record, I’m using Leopard on an Intel Mac Mini, but this will work the same on any Mac running a version of OS X version 10.2 (Jaguar) or above.

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Step 1: Downloading MacMAME

Okay, so first up, we need to go to MacMAME.org and download the latest version. You should probably do this periodically anyway to keep your copy up-to-date, as they’re constantly adding bug fixes and compatibility for more old games. As with all Mac apps, this comes in the form of a self-mounting disk image (or “dmg”) file. Double click it to mount the image and show the contents – MacMAME itself, some kind of script (don’t touch this!), and a couple of readme files.

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Step 2: Installing MacMAME

Now we need to drag the MacMAME application into the Applications folder, as always. MacMAME doesn’t touch any system files so there’s no need for an admin password or an installer or any of that stuff – just drag it in to your Applications folder (in Finder), and double-click to run it.

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Step 3: Running MacMAME For The First Time

(The first time you run the app, if you’re using Leopard, you’ll get a security warning that this application was downloaded from the internet… Just click Open and carry on.)

On first run, you’ll need to agree to a copyright warning and then you will be presented with the screen you see above. This is MacMAME itself, and we’ll need to configure a few options first. These may vary depending on your configuration, but I’ll give you an example of how I have mine set up.

• Everything in “Video” I leave alone. You’ll only need to change these settings if you have an older Mac and you’re having trouble with framerates or other graphical glitches.
• The same goes for “Audio” – the defaults will set the sound to maximum quality. If you’re on an older system and you’re having trouble with the sound cutting out or slowing things down, try turning your sample rate down.
• The “Reports” section is for people who like to get into the technical details of their ROMs (or “games”), and don’t really concern the average user. They’re useful if you’re having a problem, though.
• Under “Misc” I like to leave the first two options selected, as they’ll only come into effect if they’re needed (very, very, rarely on a modern Mac). I also select “Don’t display game info” and “Don’t display ROM disclaimer”, as these are just messages which come up before you can play your game and don’t really contain any useful information for the average gamer.

And we’re set! Now all we need to do is install some actual games, known as “ROMs”. That’s because they’re an exact copy of the original arcade games’ ROM chips, which is how software was stored back in those days.

Legal Disclaimer: ROMs are traditionally a very shady area, as a lot of the old arcade game companies are either not around anymore, have been taken over by bigger companies, or no longer offer their games for sale. That means that there aren’t any legal ways to buy a lot of MAME ROMs, and so they need to be downloaded. There are some services selling MAME ROMs for your legal peace of mind – but the FBI aren’t going to bust your door down for playing Bubble Bobble, if you get what I mean.

If you do want to go down the “illegal” route, read up on BitTorrent, and do a search for MAME ROMs on a Torrent tracker site. I find that a combination of Azureus and Mininova works particularly well…

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Step 4: Installing A ROM File

Now we need to import some of our lovely new ROM files into MacMAME. Fortunately this is a very easy process! First up, exit MacMAME by selecting “Quit” from the bottom right corner, and open up your Documents folder in the Finder. You’ll see that there’s a folder called “MacMAME User Data” in there, and within that there is a folder called ROMs. This is where your game files need to go. The files should be zip archives with all of the game data in them – you don’t need to unzip them, just dump the files straight into the folder.

If you have a large collection of ROMs and need to link this folder to somewhere else (like an external drive), it’s handy to know that MacMAME will also follow standard OS X aliases. Just delete the ROMs folder, right-click (or option-click) the folder containing your actual ROMs, and select “Make Alias”. Name the alias “ROMs” and drag it into your “MacMAME User Data” folder in place of the original. Trust me, it works!

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Step 5: ROM Files Are Recognised By MacMAME

Now we need to fire up MacMAME again, and it’ll import all of the ROM files we just added. In this case, there’s only 1, but it’ll work the same if there are 1, 100, or even 1000 files.

Depending on where the ROM came from, there may be screenshots and other graphics embedded in it. You can have a look through these things within MacMAME by selecting the game from the left-hand pane, and using the drop-down box on the right to cycle through the information. The important part though is actually launching the game, which we can do by clicking on “Play” in the bottom right-hand corner.

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Step 6: Your Game Is Ready!

Hooray! Now for a very quick crash course in MAME. As this is an emulator, the game itself thinks it is running on the old arcade cabinet, so it’ll need to be told that a coin has been inserted before it’ll do anything. Do this by pressing 5 (you might want to press it a few times, after all, these virtual coins are free!), then press 1 for a 1-player game or 2 for 2-player.

By default, MacMAME is configured to use the keyboard arrow keys, and Ctrl, Option, and Spacebar as fire buttons 1, 2, and 3, respectively. You can press Esc to pause your game – this will also bring up the standard MacMAME menu across the top of the screen which will allow you to change sound, video, and performance settings on-the-fly. Finally, you can press Tab for an advanced configuration menu, which I won’t go into here.

Hint: This is the first place you should look if you want to change your controls.

As always, for more information consult the readme file included with the original installation package, or read the (outdated but still useful) documentation on the MacMAME website.

Happy gaming!