OMG Nintendo.com

I found this following a long chain of links I don't quite remember, but this is the source and my goodness but it's amazing. This is a working GameCube system painstakingly modded into a replica of WALL-E, the painfully adorable protagonist of the latest Pixar film. It was designed before the movie came out, but honestly, recycling an old and unloved system into a rockin' casemod is perfectly in line with what WALL-E's all about.

This video combines two of my favorite things, the Wii Balance Board and those weirdly adorable little Roomba robot vacuum cleaners. Simply put, a man has hacked his Roomba so that he can control its movements with Balance Board input. The hack uses little more than his laptop and some transmitters, and is amazingly adorable in practice.

Remember way back when someone did a study that found that surgeons who played a lot of Kororinpa Marble Mania performed better in surgeries? As a result of this and similar research, it looks like resident surgeons at the Banner Good Samaritan Hospital in Phoenix, AZ are now required to play Wii games as part of their training. Unfortunately, the article doesn't make it clear which titles the residents are playing.

Check behind the cut for a particularly illuminating excerpt of the original article.

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Eighteen Japanese scientists at the Osaka Bioscience Institute discovered and named a new protein that aids vision by rapidly passing electric impulses from the brain to the eyes. They called it Pikachurin, in honor of the Pokemon franchise's mascot monster. To quote Nintendo World Report's excellent coverage of the announcement:

The protein is used for transmitting signals (electrical impulses) from the human eyes to the brain. It is also used heavily in the eyes to assist tracking of moving objects. Without Pikachurin, these electrical impulses sent from the eyes to the brain would take around three to four times as long to reach their destination.

it will be joining the goofier side of the science textbooks alongside Sonic Hedgehog, a protein that plays a major role in organ development in mammals. Just think: in a hundred years, these names are going to annoy the crap out of the scientists of the future.

Here's something arguably old, but interesting enough that I shall leave it with you for the night. What does the inside of a Wii Remote look like? If you're CNet, you've got the tools and expertise required to take the controller apart, so you just disassemble it and see for yourself.

The entire piece is interesting (and brief) enough to merit a quick read, but here are some points that really stood out to me as being surprising.

• Individual Wii Remotes appear to be assembled by hand. There's a little quality assurance mark on the inside of each remote. To my knowledge, that's insanely unusual as consumer electronics go.
• The case is the only thing holding the various Remote buttons in place. I kind of wonder if this could cause a loss of sensitivity if your Wii Remote casing gets loose somehow.
• You can't open up a Wii Remote without a special screwdriver. Clearly Nintendo doesn't want things happening to loosen controller casings, like people idly deciding to dismantle controllers.

Remember what I said about Mario Kart Wii making people a little crazy? I'd like to think of this as more proof.

Force Dynamics is one of the world's leading manufacturers of sophisticated driving simulators that use tilting body cages to make the virtual drivers feel acceleration and impact instantly. Units aren't priced on the website, but given that they're custom-built for individual clients, it's safe to say they're ridiculously expensive.

So what do the Force Dynamics guys do with their hyper-realistic, super-expensive simulation units when they're hanging around the shop floor? The answer should be obvious. Like real manly men, they play the world's most immersive game of SNES Mario Kart.

The Wii's so small, all it would take is a screen to make it portable. So, Chinese electronics wholesaler Chinavasion has manufactured one.

Simply called the Nintendo Wii LCD Monitor 7 Inch, this 7" folding screen snugly attached to your Wii over the various connection ports in the back. Taking up only the AV port, the other ports and even a cooling vent for the fan are duplicated on the back of the Monitor's chassis. The Monitor even includes an extra set of AV ports so you can hook up a DVD player or, hell, even another system to the Monitor if you like.

Of course, the necessity of a sensor bar and somewhere to plug the Wii's hefty power supply into means that the Monitor won't be letting your Wii replace your DS any time soon. As Chinavasion's site states, this is meant more to make your Wii into something you can easily mount on the roof of a car (or just play on a spacious back seat). Now, whether this sort of limited portability is worth the $101.45 cost of a single screen is up to you and your personal travel schedule.

Datel's Freeloader swap disc initially opened the way for import gaming on the Wii, but rumors are already swirling that Nintendo next major firmware update is going to break it, leaving your Freeloader DVD as little more than a coaster.

With the Twilight Hack giving every homebrew coder in the world access to the Wii's internal architecture, the emergence of a program like Gecko Region Free was inevitable. Load the software up on whatever you use to implement the Twilight Hack and enjoy yourself some region-free gaming. If you happen to use a USB Gecko as your chainloader, you also get a screenshot and debugging tools.

Right now the program is very new and hasn't been tested for all games yet, but it's already believed to be resistant to breakage since it uses hardware to decrypt. With the Twilight Hack getting easier and easier to run, a beautiful Wii import community may be about to blossom - although Nintendo can't be happy about this. Can you imagine what the Brawl scene would've been like if this release two months ago?

Did you ever play The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures in full co-op? Seriously, leave a comment or something if you did. I'm not convinced there's many of you out there. Playing with four GBAs was a real pain, a lot of people didn't bother.

Retro guru Racketboy and buddy fastbilly1 have worked out a devious scheme that takes the GBAs entirely out of the equation. Sure, it involves getting together five TVs and five GameCubes, but it also means that every player gets a nice big screen to look at and a controller of his/her own. Spectators get to view one of the utterly awesome LAN-like game parties ever hosted. Video follows, and full instructions for setting it up yourself are at the link. I am so doing this soon.

Broken Review is a new site that's all about putting products through fairly standard durability and stress tests... and then seeing just how much punishment they can absorb before finally breaking. They ambitiously decided to start by demolishing a Nintendo DS, resulting in some truly spectacular pics of the poor machine after it was finally torn to pieces. So what did it take to finally shatter the Lite?

Dropped at 50mph, thown from a story high onto tile, destroyed on a second story drop, split in half when thrown against a wall then ripped to pieces on camera. The DS Lite is sadly no longer with us. The extreme testing got the better of it just before we threw it into a sink of water.

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