Hasta La Gadget!

Expert LEGO builder Peerk Kreuger aka mahjqa is back with a timely creation that will make you soil your BatUndies. Kreuger made a couple of motorized versions of the Tumbler as well as of The Bat.

The Tumblers – available in Batman Black and Bane Brown Camo – have LED lights and seem to handle rough terrain quite well. The Bat has moving propellers but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t actually fly.

Still not impressed? Here:

Check out Kreuger’s Flickr page for more pictures. He’ll also probably upload the build instructions for both vehicles on his website, but this time he’s also put up proposals on Cuusoo for each vehicle. Will these cars remain unofficial vigilantes or will they be recognized superheroes of LEGO Gotham? You got the power. Make it happen.

[via The Brothers Brick]

Say what you want about its origins or depth, but Angry Birds is a prime example of touchscreen gaming done right. But what about its PC and Mac versions? Maybe Rovio should’ve included something similar to this USB controller.

Simply called Super Angry Birds, it’s a force feedback USB controller that makes playing the game even more intuitive. It was made by CIID students Andrew Spitz and Hideaki Matsui for one of their classes. Watch the video to see it in action as well as how it works:

All I want is that itty bitty TNT plunger.

[via Sound+Design via Kotaku]

Sony has DualShock controllers, but Sega has literally shocking controllers. Not by default of course. A modder has made a couple of Sega Genesis gamepads that actually electrocute players via a shock collar. Now that’s hardcore.

The mod is called Genezap and it was made by a modder going by the moniker Furrtek. He connected a shock collar and a microcontroller to each gamepad and then wrote custom software so that certain conditions in the game will prompt the microcontroller to activate the collar. Furrtek then inserted code in several Genesis games to work with the painful experiment. For example, he edited Battletoads so that the player will be zapped if he loses a life. He also edited the original Sonic game to deliver a shock if the player dies or loses rings. Skip to about 1:25 in the video for the demo:

I may not understand French, but pain is a universal language. Head to Furrtek’s website (also in French) for details on this crazy mod.

[via Joystiq]

While the best way to play games today is on huge monitors or HDTVs, a company called Oculus believes that future games will be better off with a much smaller display. The Oculus Rift is a virtual reality headset that displays 3D video, and it’s got the big fishes of the gaming industry nerdgasming in excitement.

The current Rift prototype has a 1280×800 resolution (640×400 per eye) and connects to PCs via DVI (or HDMI via an adapter). It’s hardly the first 3D headset to be developed, but Oculus claims that their product has two main advantages: a 110º field of view and ultra low latency. The two should make for a responsive and engaging experience. But Oculus is smart enough to know that great hardware must also be complemented with great software, which is why they’ve started a Kickstarter to offer developer kits and of course gain much needed publicity and support from game developers.

As I said, the Kickstarter fundraiser is aimed at developers, but everyone’s free to donate. A pledge of at least $300 (USD) gets you a developer kit. Along with the SDK, the kit comes with a version of Doom 3 that’s been optimized for the Rift. Hopefully Oculus can show off (simulated) footage of the Rift’s display. I wonder if this would work well with the Leap controller.

[via BBC]

Here’s a fun and trippy hack made by programmer Peter Nitsch. Nitsch’s website converts feed from Google’s Street View to ASCII art in real time. You can also search for locations, just like in the vanilla web app. And yep, it has a “green mode.”

Here’s a closer look at that shot:

And here’s the Matrix mode:

You really should see it for yourself. Nitsch recommends using Chrome or Firefox 8 and above. The characters change as the view slowly pans. It’s like looking at the world from the point of view of a computer.

[via Waxy]