Hasta La Gadget!

Chart specialists – chartists? chartologists? – Pop Chart Lab crammed all 709 officially released games for the NES in one print. The spiral chart has 8 arms, each representing a different genre – platformer, RPG, fighter etc. – although they also classified some games under “multi-genre.”

The games are arranged chronologically, with over 100 tiny illustrations for the 8-bit console’s notable games such as Super Mario Bros., Mega Man and the infamous Battletoads.  The print measures 24″ x 36″ so I don’t think it will be hard to read or recognize what’s on it. Here’s a closer look at the print:

Pop Chart Lab is selling The Nebula of NES Games print for $32 to $147 (USD) depending on the finishing option. You can order just the print, have it framed, mounted on a panel or installed with hanging rails.

[via The Escapist]

We’ve seen a guitar used to send emails. Here’s a piano modded into a BFC for the grand daddy of modern first person shooters. Aptly named the Doom Piano, its keys are grouped into different commands, so you don’t really need to know how to play the piano to play Doom with it. Not that anyone would play the game with this thing.

According to CNET Asia, the Doom Piano was built by a group of indie game developers for the London Hackspace, a community-run workshop for makers and tinkerers. The devs covered the piano’s hammers with copper tape, soldered the strings to a ground and then wired three I-PACs to emulate keyboard input. From there – not that I understand what “there” is – I guess it was just a matter of mapping the keys to the controls for Doom.

Ahhh, music only a space marine could love. Also, YouTuber v21 pointed out that the man playing the Doom Piano in the video is also an FPS legend. He’s Martin Hollis, the director of GoldenEye 007.

[via Sos Sosowski & CNET Asia]

Pauline Acalin mashed up the Neil deGrasse Tyson reaction meme with Nintendo’s classic boxing game Punch-Out!! to create this funny print. Can you imagine what physics boxing would be like? Chess boxing would be a walk in the park compared to that.

What’s that?

You beat Glass Joe?

…

You can order Pauline’s print at the it8bit store for just $5.50 (USD).

Nowadays, we often hear about unmanned aerial vehicles aka UAVs or drones in the news as next generation weapons of war. The researchers at MIT’s SENSEable City Lab want to dispel that notion and show people that this new technology can be used in more positive ways. For example, as tour guides.

The SkyCall project uses a Wi-Fi network, a mobile app and quadcopters equipped with GPS, a camera and other onboard sensors to create smart tour guides. A prototype of SkyCall is already being tested at the labyrinthine grounds of MIT. To summon a drone, the user uses the call feature on the SkyCall app. When your friendly guide arrives, the user enters the alphanumeric code for his destination (I don’t know how he gets the code in the first place though). The guide will then start moving at a leisurely pace.

The drone will even talk about landmarks along the way and can be stopped by the user through the app. The drone also uses GPS to detect if the user has fallen behind a certain distance and will wait and then alert him through the app.

The SkyCall: why ask people for directions when you can build a sophisticated network of satellites and robots to guide you through life? As someone who is socially inept, I’m only being half sarcastic. I’d love to have a drone buddy to guide me around and perhaps even protect me.

[MIT SENSEable City Lab via Dezeen]

If you love playing RPGs, perhaps you’ve imagined what skills and prerequisites you’d need to have in the real world to reach your desired job or level of success. The folks at web development agency 352 Media thought of doing the same thing to their profession and created Dungeons & Developers, an RPG-style skill tree that outlines what you need to learn to become a master web developer.

As with a typical RPG, each icon in the tree represents a skill. The skills involve learning about things like CSS, AJAX & APIs and Advanced DB Management. When you learn a skill, your character gains stats and unlocks more advanced skills. But 352 Media took their geeky project a step further and made it possible so you could actually use the skill tree to help you learn about web development and keep track of your progress while you’re learning. Each skill contains a link to an educational resource such as a tutorial. Your skill tree is tied to a unique URL, so you can bookmark it to save your progress, then check back to see if you’re bound to level up.

Once you’ve learned a skill, simply left click its icon to add a point into it. Right-click on a learned skill to subtract a point. You cheater. Speaking of cheating, Dungeons & Developers also has a god mode. 352 Media says you can unlock 100% completion if you “go old school.”

Head to Dungeons & Developers to check out the skill tree. As a fan of RPGs I can’t help but point out that the tree is misleading. It’s missing a few arrows for the other prerequisites needed to unlock the ultimate skill. It’s no biggie though, just know that all of the skills at the second to the last row need to be learned before you can unlock Web Development Mastery. The earliest you can do that is at level 26, so get grinding!

[via Boing Boing]