This is possibly the most interesting toy I have bought in a while. I took a bit of a gamble buying it, unsure if it was a crappy gimmick, or something actually usable.

Turns out, with a good bit of practice, it’s probably going to be the latter. There’s a lot of fiddling involved to get it working, and a REAL LOT of practice just to get the hang of making it do anything meaningful at all, but after less than an hour of mucking about, I was able to play Unreal Tournament 3 with some semblance of competence.

Now, the above isn’t exactly a display of my finest moments playing an FPS - the bots are on Novice level, and I’m clearly jumping around randomally, killing myself with the occasional rocket, running into walls, and generally acting like a retarded rabbit. However, outside of using a mouse to move the camera, everything else - forward and backward movement, side stepping, jumping, main and alt weapon fire - is being achieved via micro-movements in my facial muscles. If you can’t be bothered watching all the way to the end, I managed 3rd place out of 6. I’ve actually placed 1st a couple of times, but of course I wasn’t recording those…

The future is coming, folks.

UPDATE [14/09/08]:

After a few more hours practice, it seems I am improving. The below video is from this morning - a win, including 2 Killing Sprees, on the Shangri La map. I’m still fighting Novice bots, and I still have a bit of trouble at times, but I do feel I’m improving. As before, I’m using the mouse to aim, but everything else is via the NIA.

I have a Zhevra!

It’s totally raining MMO beta keys at our place right now.

I wonder what’s next?

Seems I got invited to the Round 3 Closed Beta for Age of Reckoning.

That was unexpected. The only reason I have a beta-center account was because I entered my Open Beta key from Preorder.

It’s all NDA’d and such, so there wont be any exciting news here about it, but I’m looking forward to trying to crash the client. :)

So, once I got over the “rhythm games are silly” phase of my life - thanks to Guitar Hero 3 - I have opened myself up to a whole new range of gaming.

Unfortunately, most of it is crap, but I have found something quite wonderful. Called Audio Surf, it’s a rhythm-game influenced “puzzle racer” apparently. No, I hadn’t heard of puzzle racers before either, but think a “match 3 colours” game combined with.. racing. yeah. something like that.

The real beauty of the whole thing though, is that you supply your own music - in any of a number of formats - and the game makes the track to suit the music. And make the track to suit the music, it most certainly does.

The speed of movement, the placement of the blocks, the amazing background visuals, everything is perfectly timed to the tempo and intensity of the music.

I tried a number of artists and genres, and the results were all entirely pleasing, in one way or another.

KMFDM and Ultraviolence made for a fast and furious edge-of-your-seat freefall experience, whilst Brian Eno’s more  sedate Music for Airports 1/1 led to a suitably ambient ponderous game.

What really made it though, was playing the entirety of Blur’s Parklife album back to back. The resulting experience was a true rollercoaster of cheeky bouncing, upward meandering wonderment and downhill thrill-riding. Easily the most fun you can have with brit-pop without pills and a bad head in the morning.

All of this made better by the fact that the whole game only costs us$10 and you can download it over Steam. Happy days.