Hasta La Gadget!

That’s right folks, this is an arcade style controller for a real time strategy game. Now you can pull off that 54-hit Zergling combo and trace a HCF route for your Marines. My ignorance in StarCraft II aside, control your fanboy rage and approach this mod as curio, not as an attack to your way of life pastime.

The controller was made by Mauricio Romano, a Master League StarCraft II player. It’s the winning entry in a contest held by fighting game website Shoryuken. So hate the contest organizer, not the contestant. Because it’s impossible to control SC II with just 6 buttons, Romano opted to go with 29 buttons, including two control buttons – one on either side – plus a space and a shift button. The hemisphere on the left looks like a trackball mouse, but it’s actually a joystick with a really large cap. The arcade influence also shows in the decal, which features Kerrigan, Raynor and a couple of Marines. There’s also a string of LEDs along the fringes of the case. The controller is recognized by a PC as a USB keyboard, so there’s no need to map keys or configure anything.

Here’s Romano and his short shorts demoing the controller:

Check out Romano’s Imgur gallery for more pictures and a breakdown of his build process.

[via Shoryuken via Joystiq]

It won’t help you travel through time, but this DIY time circuit clock made by PhilB of Adafruit Industries will make your car much cooler. Especially if you happen to have a DeLorean DMC-12.

PhilB used a Teensy microcontroller, a ChronoDot clock module and of course nine LED displays to make the clock. He encased the guts in laser-cut acrylic that was sprayed with faux hammered metal paint.

Unfortunately PhilB or Adafruit Industries can’t sell the clock because of copyright issues. But if you’re good with electronics, head to Adafruit Industries’ blog to get the instructions.

[via The Verge]

A couple of years ago we saw a glove that can play rock paper scissors. While that glove was smart – it learns from your patterns – it could still lose. This robot hand on the other hand will win 100% of the time, all the time. It’s not psychic, it just has insanely fast reflexes.

Scientists at the Ishikawa Oku Laboratary used a combination of a high speed camera and a fast moving robot hand, resulting in a rock paper scissors champ that recognizes what hand its opponent is going to play. In other words, the robot will wait for you to make your move before it decides what to play, but it all happens in only a few milliseconds that you won’t be able to notice it. Watch the demo below:

You know who can beat this robot? The glove. Problem solved.

[via Ishikawa Oku Laboratory via IEEE via Ubergizmo]

When it comes to FPS gaming, I don’t think anything can top the ol’ mouse and keyboard combo if we’re looking at functionality. The sheer number of keys plus the accuracy of the mouse just can’t be beat. But if we’re talking about comfort, you can’t beat the console’s sidekick, the gamepad. What if there was a controller that combined the best of both worlds?

Sadly, Peter Von Buskirk’s Trackball PC Game Controller is not that perfect amalgam. But it is a compromise with potential.  If you’ve used either a gamepad or a trackball then you know what to expect from this concept.

I like the controller a lot, but I have two complaints about it. First of all, why is this only being made for the PC and not for consoles? I think this will benefit not only the fans of the annual Shoot of Shooty: Men of Shooting fps games, but also strategy games and other games that require lots of pointing and browsing, games which are hard to implement on the console partly because of the lack of a mouse.

My second complaint is the location of the trackball. By placing it on the right, it exacerbates the weakness of gamepads – now you’ll have access to even less buttons because your right thumb is making sweet love to that sexy trackball. It would be fine if the left half of the controller had buttons, but there’s still a D-pad there.

Von Buskirk setup a Kickstarter fundraiser for the controller; unfortunately as of this writing he’s only managed to raise about $12,000 (USD) out of his $125,000 goal, with only 8 days remaining to fulfill the quota. You can still pledge for the controller if you want – $36 is enough to reserve a unit – you won’t be charged if the fundraiser doesn’t meet it’s quota anyway so you don’t have anything to lose. I hope Von Buskirk keeps working on his controller even if his fundraiser fails. Maybe he’ll find the perfect compromise someday.