I was just Youtubing when I came across this masterpiece:
Category Archives: Game Animal
The End Of Nintendo-Thimb?
The following recent article from Live Science was just too good to let go. In fact, it’s so good I’m Ctrl + V’ing it, just in case The Live Science site gets eaten by three-headed green monsters spewing toxic waste from their arses. Such articles are deemed to be ever ridiculed, regardless their actual validity.
The days of attacking aliens with a joystick could soon be over thanks to a breakthrough technique where a teenager played Space Invaders using only signals from his brain.
With a technique that takes data from the surface of the brain, a 14-year-old boy from St. Louis was able to play the two-dimensional Atari game without so much as lifting a finger.
In Space Invaders, a popular computer game from the 1970’s, players control a movable laser cannon in attempts to shoot rows of aliens that move back and forth across the screen. The objective is to kill the aliens before they have a chance to get to the bottom of the screen. Once they land, the game ends. The aliens can also shoot at the cannon, so the player has to try and evade the shots.
The boy, who already had grids implanted to monitor his brain for epilepsy, was connected to a computer program that linked the video game to the grids. He was then asked to move his hands, talk, and imagine things. The researchers correlated these movements to the different signals fired by the brain.
They then asked the boy to play Space Invaders by moving his hand and tongue and then to imagine those movements without actually performing them.
“He cleared out the whole Level One basically on brain control,” said Eric Leuthardt, a researcher at the School of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis. “He learned almost instantaneously. We then gave him a more challenging version in two-dimensions and he mastered two levels there playing only with his imagination.”
A couple of years back, Leuthardt and colleagues performed this research on four adults. But they wanted to explore possible differences between teenagers and adults. Although it’s too early to tell from testing just one teenager, Leuthardt thinks that teens may win this game.
“We observed much quicker reaction times in the boy and he had a higher level of detail of control—for instance, he wasn’t moving just left and right, but just a little bit left, a little bit right,” Leuthardt said.
Forget the Wii, the revoution has truly begun.
The Second Eurovision Party Of The Year
The second qualifying heat of the Eurovision Song Contest gave us the opportunity to host a little get-together with Chris, Tanya and Mats yesterday evening. We ate pizza, drank varying amounts of alcohol, and had a generally excellent evening. I actually didn’t get into the mood of things as much as I’d wanted to, this being due to shaking off some kind of illness, but I appreciated the company nonetheless.
As it turned out, the two chaps spent a solid three hours in front of the screen trying to sort out our problem with connecting the Nintendo DS through a recently purchased USB wifi connector. This is a fair amount of time for anyone (or, in this case, two), but these guys know their stuff when it comes to computers, so I’m mightily impresses with the result, which looks like the problem is solved. I just have to wait for Carrie to get back to her house so I can check the connection. Even if there are further problems, huge steps have been taken in the right direction.
Personally, I have learnt a bit about my firewall, which is where the problem stems from.
It was a long time ago we socialised with these three, and considering they all live within a few kilometres of us, it’s ridiculous we don’t do it more often. Hopefully we’ll “see” a bit more of Chris, though, since he’s looking to buy a DS himself.
An Evening Playing Games (Of The Wrong Kind)
For the year we have been living in our flat we have been going through a mini-port to connect to the internet. This has, apart from the fact that we shouldn’t have to, been of no real concern. Everything we need to do gets done, and with no loss of bandwidth. Until yesterday.
I’ve been considering the best way to connect Jo’s Nintendo DS for online play of Animal Crossing: Wild World. The first option is to purchase a wi-fi router, which will also allow us to connect the unowned Nintendo Wii and X-Box 360, as well as securing us for the wi-fi future.
Ideally we’d like to get the router that our IP provides free of charge, but despite their claims on the website we cannot have one. It appears that the station which we are connected to has compatibility issues with our IP’s modems. This is a ridiculous set of circumstances, and the only thing for us to do is await some kind of executive decision to manufacture new modems that do not suffer this problem.
Another option is to buy a wi-fi router ourselves, and simply place it between our current modem and the computer. This would hopefully work (mental note: contact Jack to make sure), but I decided on a cheaper and easier solution: a wifi USB dongle.
All I have to do is run the software, attach the dongle, turn on the DS, and let the hardware do the maths. I’ve done this, and it doesn’t work (the DS connection to the computer works, but not to the server), so I search the internet for a solution. One idea is to run an updated version of the software, after going through several steps to remove all trace of the original. After fiddling about for a while I am rid of the offending software and reinstall the new, improved upgrade. This time I can’t even laod the software, getting a “Internet sharing error (6)” message. So, I uninstall the new version, using the same method as I went through the first time, and installed the old version. Same message appears.
Jo rings up our IP server, gets the miniport taken away, we realise we can’t connect at all to the internet, and go back to to the miniport (this part of the story is condensed, but involves both a minor success and complete failure of connecting to the internet).
After all this, we are back to a regular connection (no miniport), whilst being unable to connect to the Animal Crossing server. All in all, a waste of time time very well spent.
Now, I love technology, and am constantly amazed just how well .exe files work, considering the infinite amount of hardware set-ups available. When working on their own, hardware does a sterling job, but it’s when it comes to interacting that things really go arse up.
I shall be in contact with Jack to talk about the wi-fi router.
A wish To Save More
I use price-comparison sites like Pricerunner on a regular basis in my search for video games. I find the idea a superb one, though its implementation leaves my asking questions; with a few changes such sites could be a goldmine of information, and not the half-satisfactory tool it is.
I should like to be able to include my own sites to any searches I do. Whilst the results given often give a good price of games, there are many other independent shops that could be referenced. As it is I still have to go through the labourious task of manually searching for the best price, even after using Pricerunner. Since it is not unusual to find a price difference of several hundred crowns for certain (normally older) games, this is very much worth my while doing. I reckon there are ten or so sites I do or could add to Pricerunner’s standard version, which would make me feel I’m not missing a good deal.
It would also be a fantastic improvement if these sites were to become more community driven. By this I mean the ability to see other users’ pages and inclusions (those, for example, who have also searched for the same product as I) to glean any further sites for my own use. I’m sure that there are many other sites I am unaware of, and being able to see others’ additions would make me sure I have explored all the options before purchasing.
I have no idea how easy this would be to implement, and I see that it’s not in Pricerunner’s economic interests to allow it, but it would truly be a huge step in the right direction.