Hasta La Gadget!

At the 2013 Chaos Communication Congress, a group of hackers called Mema Haxx showed off a neat trick: streaming and controlling applications from a PC to a Wii U GamePad. They even played a bit of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker from a Gamecube emulator. Hacker humor folks.

I’m not even going to pretend that I understand what Mema Haxx did to pull this off, especially since you can watch the presentation in its entirety in the video below. Lesser mortals such as I should proceed to around 47:30 in the video to check out the demo.

You can also read Mema Haxx’ presentation on Google Docs. Although the group thinks that the hack is very promising, it’s still in alpha and won’t be of any use to anyone except coders. For now you’d be better off commissioning a Cross Plane. But keep that Wii U GamePad healthy.

[via Engadget]

We’ve seen Pokémon drawn with pencils, food, thread, aluminum powder, sculpey, clay, marble, LEGO and digital ink. Jacob Carter chose a simple but challenging way to depict the famous monsters: leaves.

Jacob calls his series Natural Pokémon. Aside from leaves, he also uses pebbles, and cheats a bit with cardboard and ink for the eyes and feet of Pokémon.

Jacob probably won’t be able to depict all Pokémon using just the leaves he finds on his own. Maybe he can ask people to send him preserved leaves of different colors and textures.

[via Imgur via Incredible Things]

When I first saw OpenEmu, it was already able to play games from different previous gen systems, but it had this experimental streak to it. Four years later, it has put its wild days behind. The new OpenEmu is a suave and streamlined application that looks and behaves like a native OS X program.

OpenEmu uses open source emulators for the Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, Game Gear, NeoGeo Pocket, Nintendo DS, NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, Sega 32X, Sega Master System, TurboGrafx-16 and the Virtual Boy. The beauty of it is that you don’t have to switch between emulators to play digital copies of games that you legally own (henceforth known as DCOGTYLO). Simply load DCOGTYLO into OpenEmu and it will figure out what emulator each one runs on, similar to how your computer automatically opens your other files in their respective programs (well, most of the time anyway).

Another great feature of OpenEmu is that it downloads game covers for your DCOGTYLO over the Internet, then presents it in interfaces that OS X users will be familiar with, such as Cover Flow. Those two features combine to give you an elegant way to organize and view your DCOGTYLO collection.

But OpenEmu really shines if you take the time to get to know its more technical features. For starters, it supports a wide variety of gamepads, from generic USB controllers to the DualShock 4. It also has a variety of video filters that can make you fell like you’re back in third grade, looking up at a 15″ CRT TV, when you’re actually playing a DCOGTYLO on your MacBook Air. At work. Here’s a great preview of OpenEmu by Lon Seidman:

You can download OpenEmu for free. The emulator’s developers also bundled a pack of homebrew games for those that don’t have a DCOGTYLO to play.

[via OS X Daily]

So you think you have a huge backlog of games? Video game historian Michael Thomasson has to play two full games each day for the next 15 years if he hopes to get through all of his. That was back in September, when the Guinness World Book of Records recognized that the New Yorker had the world’s largest collection of video games at 10,607 distinct games.

That’s the record holder in the badass Intellivision t-shirt. As of November 28, when he uploaded the video below, Michael already had almost 12,000 different games. He also owns more than a hundred game consoles, systems and whatever you call the Virtual Boy is. The thing is, he would probably have more games, but he sold his previous major collection to pay for his wedding. Awww.

Check out the Associated Press’ feature on Michael and his own writeup on YouTube for more on his collection.

[via GoNintendo & IGN]

Band of Outsiders released a line of Atari-themed apparel this Holiday season. The clothes might as well be adorned with pixel art or random colored blocks to younger gamers, but their dads and moms see cowboys, aliens and car chases there. Unless you look at the Super Breakout sweater, in which case what you see is what you get: a paddle, a ball and a wall.

I chose to feature this sweater not just because I think it looks great but also because it’s not just for Atari or Super Breakout fans. It’s for both Apple fans and haters too. The game you see here wouldn’t exist without Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, the same people that led to the iPhone and iPads, which are now home to bite-sized arcade style games in the vein of Super Breakout. If you already know that trivia then this sweater also serves as a reminder of Steve Wozniak’s talent and Steve Jobs’ business acumen, i.e. ruthlessness.

The sweater even has an Apple-like price tag: Band of Outsiders is selling it for $395 (USD). You could do worse: the Super Breakout beanie costs an insane $175.

[via Albotas]