CrunchGear |  |
- USB-powered mini Yoda figure
- 40/40: New Super Mario Bros. gets perfect score from Famitsu magazine
- Daily Crunch: Deep Sea Edition
- Italian Surface-esque museum display combines Cover Flow with a huge touchscreen
- Electric motorcycle racing – now that’s where it’s at
- Best Buy’s new Black Friday flier shows their true holiday spirit
- HP announces 4Q profits, and the news is good
- Celebrating 5 years of World of Warcraft
- Life goes behind-the-scenes of the 1954 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea
- United Airlines & Gogo offering try-before-you-buy in-flight Wifi promo
- Creative announces update to their Vado HD camcorder
- Video: Apple sees Verizon’s iDont campaign, raises them simultaneous voice-and-data
- Microsoft defends decision to ban modded Xbox 360s (but says it didn’t ban 1 million of them)
- Family Guy advertised Windows 7 after all
- iPhone Apps to keep you fit this Friday
- Honda makes the ultimate Paperboy gaming system
- A collection of reasonably priced Xbox 360 games
- Why play through Modern Warfare 2 single-player when you can watch this 60-second synopsis?
- A storm is brewing at Best Buy
- Swedish watchmakers create a Void
| Posted: 24 Nov 2009 05:20 AM PST
Tokyo-based Cube Works, whose products regularly find their way outside Japan (example: the humping USB dog), has announced a mini Yoda figure (the little green guy from Star Wars) that you connect to your computer’s USB port. The power is needed to make Yoda’s cheeks blush and illuminate his light saber.
The mini Yoda requires Windows (XP or Vista), comes with an installation CD for some reason and runs only on computers with a 1GHZ Intel Pentium processor or better.
The figure is Japan-only, but you can pre-order it over at Geek Stuff 4 U for $65.52 plus shipping (leading time: end of next month). Via Akihabara News
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| 40/40: New Super Mario Bros. gets perfect score from Famitsu magazine Posted: 24 Nov 2009 03:00 AM PST
Japan's biggest gaming magazine, the Famitsu [JP], has given Nintendo's newest Mario game New Super Mario Bros. the highest honor in the latest issue. All four editors who tested the game gave 10 points out of 10, resulting in a perfect 40/40 score. New Super Mario Bros. is already the fourth game in 2009 to get a 40/40 rating, even though until 2007 the magazine was well-known for not giving away this score easily. But the perfect rating isn’t that surprising, as the game seems to be really that good and many reviewers outside Japan gave it the thumbs up already. Here is a time line for all of Famitsu’s 40/40-games so far: 1. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998, for Nintendo 64)
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| Daily Crunch: Deep Sea Edition Posted: 24 Nov 2009 12:00 AM PST |
| Italian Surface-esque museum display combines Cover Flow with a huge touchscreen Posted: 23 Nov 2009 10:30 PM PST
Of course, it’s nearly impossible to see this thing in action because the presentazione they’ve made is so unbelievably awful. Yes, showcase your state-of-the-art technology in a 320×240 video that’s three-quarters slow zooms on pictures you already have in a gallery. And have some nice calming jungle music in there as well. Good. Ver-r-r-y gooood. Anyway, it looks nice, though they might be getting a nice, juicy cease and desist from Apple for doing such a blatant ripoff of Cover Flow. [via Cult of Mac and Gizmodo]
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| Electric motorcycle racing – now that’s where it’s at Posted: 23 Nov 2009 10:00 PM PST
In fact, the governing body of the MotoGP series is in the process of organizing some races. There are already four on the calendar, with more expected. While no official rules are yet available, it does go without saying that this will draw all kinds of attention to the electric vehicle scene. And while electric motorcycles are certainly exciting, perhaps you’d prefer something more sedate. Turns out that Rolls-Royce is also jumping onto the green bandwagon with a electric powered Phantom. It’ll be released next year, but don’t expect your bank to finance it for you. It’s going to sell for half a million. [via Autopia]
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| Best Buy’s new Black Friday flier shows their true holiday spirit Posted: 23 Nov 2009 09:22 PM PST
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| HP announces 4Q profits, and the news is good Posted: 23 Nov 2009 04:30 PM PST
HP has given credit to their Services division for the profits, despite a decline in software, imaging, and printing revenue. HP is also optimistic about 1Q 2010, and predicting earnings of $0.90 to $0.92 cents a share.
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| Celebrating 5 years of World of Warcraft Posted: 23 Nov 2009 03:31 PM PST
World of Warcraft turns 5-years-old today. Back on November 23, 2004, a year before the current generation of video game systems even began (with the launch of the Xbox 360), Blizzard released the massively multi-player online game at a time when massively multi-player online games were still largely the haunt of hardcore gamers, people with fast Internet connections who were willing to pay $15 per month for access to a game that they already bought. Who can forget the message board threads: Why do I have to pay for a game that I already paid for at the store? How do you beat the game? What happens if and when I stop playing? You won’t stop playing. Five years in, Blizzard has 11.5 million (as of December, 2008) subscribers all over the world. (Note: Not every region of the world has a pay-per-month regime. You pay by the hour in China, for example.) In these five years, the game has gone from plucky upstart, going up against other, well-established MMOGs, to the undisputed number one such game. Now, that may not necessarily be a good thing, but it’s hard to see someone knocking World of Warcraft off its perch. Well, someone other than World of Warcraft II. I’m a veteran of vanilla WoW, but only just. I bought the game in September, 2006; The Burning Crusade came out a few months later. I bought the game because I was roped into some consulting session for a rather big company. "Hey, you’re young. Play WoW and Second Life and tell us how we can better reach young people through them." I don’t know if the company got what it wanted (surely it didn’t!), but it certainly set me on my current path of, oh, you know, playing the game for at least three to four hours per night on most nights of the week. It’s pretty funny. When the game launched in 2004, I was a freshman in college, and one of my two roommates was all about the game. We’re talking stay-up-until-4am-every-night-of-the-week-to-play-it. I had no idea what the game was about, but I distinctly remember the day he walked into the dorm room with a box from Amazon: "Gentlemen, it’s here." (Actually, knowing the kid, it was probably more along the lines of, "Yes, it’s here! Fucking A~!" Memory fades, I’m afraid.) I’m like, so what? Can’t you see we’re playing Halo 2? (Halo 2 was very big that year. I was a good sniper. It was the last time I played a multi-player game with any conviction.) I’d say we teased my roommate about his "addiction," but I had no idea what the game was about. I had never played any of the other Warcraft games, nor Diablo. Again, I was not, and still am not, a PC gamer, so the entire Blizzard catalogue played no role in my life. The point is, the game’s launch came and went, but my only experience with it was waking up at 3:00AM because my roommate yelled, "Yes! I can buy a mount now!" Then September of 2006 rolls around, and I’m forced to buy the game for that aforementioned consulting session. I still had no interest in the game, and was only creating an account as part of my job. (Well, "job" only in the loosest sense of the word, getting paid to try to help a huge company better tap into the "young people" market.) So walk back to my room from the local Best Buy (I wasn’t boycotting it back then. You can listen to my ordeal as told on the podcast here.), and install it on my iMac. I create an account, and create my first character. It was an Undead Warrior named Rocktober—Undead because I thought they looked (and still look) the best, and Warrior because, well, Warrior is the noob class, right? "Warrior? I bet you get a sword and stuff. Count me in." I still have that character to this day. I then set aside Rocktober, and created a Night Elf Warrior on a different server so I could play with a friend of mine. (I had casually mentioned that I was playing WoW now, and he flipped out. "Oh, dude, join my server and I’ll hook you up.") I named the Nelf Warrior Zardoz, in honor of that godawful Sean Connery moviethat I had just seen in a movie class I was forced to take. (We all needed an "art" class, so to speak, and watching and critiquing movies was considered "art." Fair enough.) I was able to get Zardoz all the way up to level 58—it was harder to level in those days—before growing bored of the game. The Burning Crusade was installed somewhere around this time. A year went by without me really playing the game. Note that I was still paying for the game, just not playing it. I don’t know, I guess I never bothered to cancel my subscription. Maybe it was too much of a hassle, or maybe I didn’t notice such a small amount of money leaving my bank account every month. The point is, I’ve been paying my $15 per month non-stop since September, 2006. I’m probably never going to stop paying, either. So here’s to another five years (well, three years in my case) of unpredictable PUGs, guilds joined but not really participated in, Auctioneer-assisted money-making, and lost sleep. So much lost sleep.
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| Life goes behind-the-scenes of the 1954 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea Posted: 23 Nov 2009 02:30 PM PST
This photoset is a fantastic use of 10 minutes of your time. Life apparently spent some time on the scenes of Disney’s 1954 classic and the photos have just been posted for your viewing pleasure. They are fantastic. Jump over to the site to see for yourself. [Time via Boing-Boing]
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| United Airlines & Gogo offering try-before-you-buy in-flight Wifi promo Posted: 23 Nov 2009 02:00 PM PST
Of course this is aimed at getting more people to pay for the service, which costs $12.95 per flight. But hey, you can’t turn down free Internet. Your boss will love it.
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| Creative announces update to their Vado HD camcorder Posted: 23 Nov 2009 01:30 PM PST
So what’s new? Well, Creative has a bit of a laundry list of improvements or new features, including:
This is in addition to the 4GB of storage and HDMI output that are standard on the Vado line. Considering that this is a camera aimed at the pocket camcorder crowd, that’s quite an impressive list of new features. Honestly, the line between a full size camera and the pocket sized version is blurring. The new Vado HD is currently available for pre-order for $179.99 directly from Creative.
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| Video: Apple sees Verizon’s iDont campaign, raises them simultaneous voice-and-data Posted: 23 Nov 2009 01:24 PM PST  DING! The school bell rings. Time for recess at Mobile Industry Elementary. Tension is high. During the last break, Verizon took a swing at that little Apple boy by pointing out all the things his toys could do that Apple's toys couldn't. The hallways erupted with a deafening "Ooooooooh!"; all of the kids began to form a circle around the two. "Fight, fight, fight, fight!" they clamored.
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| Microsoft defends decision to ban modded Xbox 360s (but says it didn’t ban 1 million of them) Posted: 23 Nov 2009 01:03 PM PST
You’ll recall that Microsoft recently banned a bunch of people from Xbox Live because they had modded their 360s. Modding is against the rules, don’t you know? Microsoft told VentureBeat not to believe the numbers being thrown around—the number most relayed is 1 million banned 360s—because it never releases numbers to anyone. Again, the larger debate is: should you be allowed to mod your console? I think so, but that’s probably because my opinion on every single issue is, "So long as you don’t bother me in any direct way, do what you want." You bought the hardware (the 360 itself) so if you want to whip out a soldering iron or flash its DVD drive with a custom firmware, be my guest. At the same time, Microsoft has the right to say, "Look, Xbox Live is a service that we’re trying to keep as clean as possible. If you’re playing a game on a modded console, it’s much harder for us to ensure that the service is as clean as possible." (Where "clean" means free from cheating, hacks, etc.) Plus, why should someone be able to play a pirated copy of Modern Warfare 2 on Xbox Live when everyone else paid for it? It’s not "fair," if you will. That a law firm is possibly looking to start a class-action lawsuit over the bans is sorta silly. The law firm may have something when it comes to Microsoft owing some of these people money for the remainder of their Xbox Live contract, but I don’t know what the EULA or TOS for Xbox Live says about service termination. If you’re banned for being a jerk, are you entitled to any money left over on the contract? The moral of this particular story is, no, Microsoft didn’t ban "1 million" Xbox 360s. A surefire way to avoid being banned? Don’t use your modded Xbox 360 on Xbox Live.
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| Family Guy advertised Windows 7 after all Posted: 23 Nov 2009 11:57 AM PST
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| iPhone Apps to keep you fit this Friday Posted: 23 Nov 2009 11:30 AM PST
Go ahead and take that second helping of bacon-broasted mashed potatoes and high-fat gravy this Thursday, friends, because even if your tummy gets big and round like a steamed black bean bun, there’s an app for that. Fitness apps for all! If you’re ripped like me you don’t need all 5,000 of the pictures and videos then you can just use the app to figure out what to do between hits of Muscle Milk. However, if you need some help in the gym this is definitely the way to go. One of my favorites and well worth the investment. iFitness The app is less visually attractive than FitBuilder but it is considerably cheaper than the PumpOne offering. Trimble AllSport GPS RunKeeper Pro The app comes in two versions, Free and Pro [$9.99] and the Pro version includes voice prompts as well as photo and status updates from the road. The Pro version also allows you to set a special iPod playlist for your workout.
It’s a bit pricey but it’s a very specific tool for a very specific purpose.
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| Honda makes the ultimate Paperboy gaming system Posted: 23 Nov 2009 10:32 AM PST
Bicycle safety wasn’t an issue for me growing up. I lived in a quiet suburban subdivision on a cul-de-sac. Plus, my mom is an insurance agent and so she made sure that I always had the latest safety equipment. (E.g. shin pads, wrist pads, elbow pads, helmet, gloves, and a cup) It’s a damn good thing that Honda didn’t make this bicycle simulator back in the Eighties. She would have shipped the thing in from Japan, and I would have never been able to leave the house. Safety is the purpose of this contraption. Honda expects to install about 500 of these simulators in Japanese schools, public offices, and other locations where they can be used to educate about bicycle safety. The system itself is somewhat complex. There are a few different modes that simulates different conditions and the bike can even recognize when the rider dismounts and must walk the bike to complete the course. The post-ride mode allows the user to review the simulate from multiple vantage points and evaluate the ride. Chances are that if you want to ride one of these things, you’re going to have to plan a trip overseas. It probably won’t find its way stateside anytime soon. Who rides a bike in the US anyway? (joking)
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| A collection of reasonably priced Xbox 360 games Posted: 23 Nov 2009 10:00 AM PST
This is the worst time to be a gamer. Yeah, it’s great that so many good games have come out recently (take your pick from New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Modern Warfare 2, Assassin’s Creed II, Left 4 Dead 2, etc.), but it’s pretty difficult to shell out $60+ every other day in the span of two weeks. This list may help. It’s a bunch of older Xbox 360 games for up to 75 percent off the regular price. Granted, I don’t exactly see Modern Warfare 2 or Left 4 Dead 2, but I do spy veritable hits like GTA IV and Guitar Hero World Tour and Lego Batman and TNA Impact. I’ve listed TNA Impact primarily as a joke, because as we all know, nobody watches TNA. It’s a shame since so many of those wrestlers (Kurt Angle, AJ Styles, Samoa Joe, Christopher Daniels, Nigel McGuinness, etc.) are pretty darn good.
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| Why play through Modern Warfare 2 single-player when you can watch this 60-second synopsis? Posted: 23 Nov 2009 09:30 AM PST Is saying "I play Modern Warfare 2 for the single-player" the new "I read Playboy for the articles"? It might as well be. But get this: I play Modern Warfare 2 for the single-player. I stink at multi-player, so why even bother? That said, I know that many of you bought the game merely to play the multi-player, and thus have no idea what the single-player’s story is about. Thank God for this video, then. It’s a 60-second recap of the game’s single-player storyline, such as it is. Red Dawn was more plausible, yes.
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| A storm is brewing at Best Buy Posted: 23 Nov 2009 09:29 AM PST
Here it comes: Best Buy ran a national Black Friday ad inviting the world to celebrate Thanksgiving and Eid Al-Adha, the Muslim festival of sacrifice. Fair enough, right? Happy Eid! Well, take a gander at the ad up there and brace yourself. Look closely. You’ll probably miss the good will and wishes, they’re so innocuous. So you’d think that a national retailer would be praised for trying to reach out to its Muslim visitors and you’d also think that since Black Friday comes around Thanksgiving, an ostensibly “conservative” holiday,” they’d be excused for not putting baby Jesus in the carriage Toad drives in Mario Kart Wii on the first page of its Black Friday ad. Nope. The s-storm brewing at Best Buy is going to overtake the news cycle in a few days. Here’s an example of the rhetoric:
While I’d be happier if they celebrated a real holiday like Festivus, can’t we give Best Buy a break? This is literally the first time I’ve ever seen any major retailer celebrate Eid, it’s a nice holiday for millions of Americans, and it’s nice for BB to note that yes, it is coming up soon. And let me assure you that next week’s flyer will probably include dancing angels, Moses riding a jet-ski, and What Would Jesus Buy HDTV buying tips. Thoughts?
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| Swedish watchmakers create a Void Posted: 23 Nov 2009 09:00 AM PST
Interestingly, it only costs $199, which isn’t too bad for a high concept watch. Good old Watchismo is selling them right now.
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We might be seeing the start of a new form of motorsport. Electric motorcycles have really been at the 
In financial news, HP delivered something positive today. The fourth quarter has been a good one, with HP reporting a net income of $2.4 billion, in comparison to the $2.1 billion they reported last year. It’s nice to see some good news for a change.
Creative just announced the 3rd generation of the Vado HD. If you remember correctly, Creative launched the 
Not sure why you’d name your watch after something that doesn’t exist but the Swedes love them some existentialism. Void Watches V02 have two retrograde hands, one that shows the hours on one side and minutes on the other. It comes in four colors and uses a Japanese movement. | You are subscribed to email updates from CrunchGear To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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