Wonderland

Killzone's toolbar promo game

The folks promoting Killzone have created a toolbar game: a Firefox (or IE if you really must) toolbar add-on, which layers a simple time-crisis style shooter over your usual browsing experience.

At first, I didn't really work out what was going on: my toolbar said, YOU ARE UNDER ATTACK! but nothing happened, so I carried on clicking about. Then, mid-browse of New Tee Vee on an Escapist thing, my browser "hung": LOADING KILLZONE... PLEASE WAIT.

 
Then I got shot at by uglies.

And I died.

...and I disabled the toolbar, because I really wanted to go read the Escapist, but as promos go, this is pretty cute.

You can even play in Squads...

I wonder how much it cost, and how long it took to develop? I wonder what else add-on games can do, other than PMOG?

(Thanks Rachael!)

Epic perler bead project: all 29 characters from Final Fantasy VI

This deserves a round of applause: Faith has managed to recreate, perler bead by perler bead, all 29 characters from Final Fantasy VI.

She's selling them too !

Head to toe in gamer accessories...

There's even something for the chaps (although girls in menshirts and cufflinks is a good look too):

Starting at the top, a Nintendo hair bow:

Moving down to a Nintendo necklace:

Down to a Super Mario (lots of nintendo!) bag:

Down to a Companion Cube ring:

... and finishing with these eye-grabbing(-and-stuffing-down-your-throat) Pac-Man shoes:

Stagger.

NES soap

First they made the Playstation soaps, and now there are NES soaps. I expect the Xbox soap will be along shortly - and if it's modelled on the original Xbox controller, it'd probably last you an entire year.

Pink snugglesome Gears of War knitted neckwarmer

"Scarf" just doesn't do it justice:

Volpin Props' Bioshock syringe

This guy - made a Portal gun - videogame obsessed, makes props from games, has now made this horrific Little Sister DNA syringe from Bioshock. Picture perfect. He's obviously a complete freaking genius - and this isn't even his day job!

Question: why hasn't WETA hired him yet?

(via Offworld)

DNA Heroes

If you like techno, and men in lab coats, and guitar hero, you might like this.

Jo Roach (exec producer, also known as "The Ninja", or ninje for short) is murderously good at it. Me, I got "Egghead". Huh!

(It's part of Routesgame, and as such, a total plug for some stuff I've commissioned. You've been warned.)

x48: a gamecamp thing twixt C4 and Microsoft

Microsoft (academic) and Channel 4 (education) have merged wallets to produce X48: a 48-hour XNA code-a-thon challenge to UK videogame students & indies.

On Friday 20th March 2009, videogame design and development students from all over the UK will relocate to the University of Derby’s cutting edge Computer Games Lab for the first XNA GameCamp.

Produced by Pixel-Lab for Microsoft and Channel 4, X48 will see which games the next generation of industry talent can create in less than 48 hours. Using Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio 3.0 the teams will build game prototypes on a theme to be unveiled during Friday morning’s initiation.

The press release went out 3 days ago, and all but 2 of the 80 seats are taken at time of writing this.

Here are the tweets, and here is the site.

Again with the March thing, I'm out on a plane to GDC that day - which is also day two of the Games Based Learning Conference, so I miss both (grr). Still, as these things go, I'm expecting everyone who turns up to have plenty of FUN, and if the Global Game Jam can produce playable games, well...

Game-based Learning Conference

Early bird registration for this year's Gamebased Learning Conf closes tomorrow.

The Game Based Learning Conference is the only event of its kind currently in existence that deals with all aspects of games in learning.

The huge surge of interest amongst education professionals, game companies, learners, employers, parents, public sector agencies and technology providers over the last 5 years has been demonstrated by the overwhelming success of the gaming strands in the Handheld Learning Conference.

I'm talking on the Thursday (Friday is fly-to-GDC day) - on our plans at C4 for games-based learning (and recent performance data, too).

Speakers include:

• Tom Watson, MP, UK Cabinet Minister for Transformational Government
• Nolan Bushnell, Founder of Atari, father of the video game industry
• Ian Livingstone, Co-founder, Eidos, Chair, Computer Games Skills Council, Skillset
• Alice Taylor, Commissioning Editor, Education, Channel 4
• Dr Richard Graham, Clinical Director of Adolescent Directorate, Tavistock Centre
• Marco Minoli, Director, Slitherine
• Sean Dromgoole, CEO, Some Research & GameVision
• Derek Robertson, Learning & Teaching Scotland
• Terry Deary, Author, Horrible Histories

... and I'm desperately sad to be missing the main day of conference on Friday, but I'm an idiot and my travel plans coincided.

Early bird ends tomorrow.

World of Warcraft steins

Steins?!

Oh, er.. okay? I suppose that would be pretty epic, pulling one of those out of your bag at the post-Blizzcon pub trip. Except California doesn't have pubs, and one of these babies is unlikely to fit in your bag either.

Hmm.

(Via Kim, who drinks gin.)