All Terrain Robot

I also got this awesome “All Terrain Robot” kit for Christmas. Once you have spent a happy couple of hours building the individual components you can fit them together to make either a six tracked all terrain robot, a forklift truck or my favourite, the beer stealing ‘Gripper bot’ that you see above.

Actually, it can’t move a full can of beer – but it does look awesome. And I even got batteries included.

New Years Hornsea

For some reason we always try to go and see the sea early in the New Year. This usually means a trip to Hornsea. Today the weather and the tide were very kind to us, and so we had a little walk down the beach and I took some snaps.

The weather was nice, but very chilly in the wind. We sought refuge in an amusement arcade.

They have these “Penny Falls” machines where you try and push pennies off the a ramp. This looks like it is good to drop, but I reckon those coins are super glued into position…

The Gunstringer for Xbox 360 Kinect

When the Kinect was released I was hoping that some games would come along that made use of the things it can do to create different types of game. The sports simulation games are nice enough, as are the dancing ones, but I’ve been waiting for completely new game types.

The Gunstringer is certainly new. You use your left hand to control a gunslinging marionette in his (its?) quest for vengeance against those who done him wrong.  The right hand is used for targeting and shooting. The whole thing is presented in the form of a puppet show with a live audience who cheer you on and boo the bad guys.

There are daft cut scenes, some great voice acting and the whole thing is powered by a 3D engine that seems to be called “Beard”. It is all delightfully silly and great fun. You can download a demo version and have a play with that, and once you have had a taste I reckon you’ll be forking out for the full game.

New Years Eve Games: Dobble, Spot it! and The Resistance

We spent New Years Eve playing some games we’d not tried before.

First up was Dobble. This is an awesome little pattern matching card game with very simple rules and amazingly raucous gameplay. Great fun with a whole bunch of mini-games. While looking up links for this blog post I’ve found that Dobble is no more, but the game is now being sold under the much more sensible name of Spot-It. Same game but much cheaper. If you want to keep a bunch of kids (or adults who are a bit like kids) busy – but not quiet – then take a look at this game.

The Resistance is much more cerebral. You are either a loyal resistance member or a traitor bent on sabotaging missions. As the game progresses it is up to the loyal members to identify the traitors and the traitors to sow confusion amongst the ranks and thwart everything. This is great fun too, especially if you get to play as a traitor.

PlayMusic for Windows Phone

I seem to be on a Windows Phone application roll at the moment. This one has just gone live in the Marketplace too. I had the idea for it when I was driving into work last Tuesday. I built the application in around an hour, spent 30 minutes or so making it pretty and building the icons and then submitted it into Windows Phone Marketplace. And now you can load it.

It doesn’t do much, but I find it useful. I built it as a workaround to get music playing when I’m driving along. I like to be able to start the music playing using voice commands and I’ve not found a way to do this with the phone. I can start programs running (including Zune) but I can’t start music playing. This may be something that I’ve missed, but I enjoyed writing the application anyway so it is not a loss as far as I am concerned.

I can get music playing by just using the voice command “Start PlayMusic”. When the application runs it just picks a random playlist (or album if there are no playlists on the phone) and plays it. If the music is already playing it does nothing. The program also displays a pithy message (those took longer to think up than writing the actual program code). If it solves a problem for you, then grab a copy.