Big ass mobile games publisher, Gameloft announced Monday plans to dive deeper into development of games for Blackberry smartphones. Since controlling a game with a keypad mostly sucks, it'll be cool to see how they use the trackball on the Blackberry Pearl and Blackberry 8800. It'll also be cool to hear about execs getting canned for playing Centipede in board meetings.
Behold the iBoy, a functioning Apple iPod built from twigs and used Chinese newspapers.
Actually, the iBoy is a fusion of the original Nintendo Game Boy and iPod. It's a cool music player that pays homage to video gaming's roots. It's also a neat piece of homemade engineering.
You can build your very own iBoy by following its creators instructions here.
It's been an interesting week for handheld game units. Apple's announced that fifth-generation iPods will now be able to play Bejeweled. Sony's planning to bundle its PSP system with a game, 1-gigabyte memory stick, and a UMD movie. And Nintendo's rolling out two new flavors of DS Lite this week.
To butcher Prince with much gusto, color me pink and black, and hardly taken aback. But it's nice to know that amid the opening salvos of the second phase of the next-generation console wars, the little guys are fighting for their place in the sun, even if it is by packing in a crappy movie with a console, giving folks the same old stuff in new colors, or letting them play Pac-Man -- with a click wheel.
Oh, the places I've taken my Nintendo DS...
I've played Animal Crossing in a funeral home. I took Advance Wars into the bathroom at Yankee Stadium. When a game company trapped me and some fellow writers on Alcatraz, I sought to tunnel out not with a homemade shiv and a rat-faced con named Pimples, but rather the DS and WarioWare.
The DS comes with me everywhere and, like The Man in Black, I've been everywhere, man.
Now if I'd only taken pictures of me playing my DS, I could enter this contest and attempt to win free money, a trip on a Zero-G plane, a DS Lite (which I've sadly yet to upgrade to), and three games.
The Seattle Times claims Microsoft's new handheld game-playing device is code-named Argo, after the ship in Greek mythology -- the one Jason, Orpheus, and Heracles piloted on their quest to find the golden fleece.
According to columnist Brier Dudley, Microsoft is developing a handheld media player that will compete not only with Apple's iPod, but also Sony's PSP and Nintendo's Game Boy DS. Argo will have WiFi and Internet capabilities, Dudley says, and should be on sale by Christmas.
(Keep in mind, though, that Dudley's report is pieced from "some research, reporting, and information from a source close to the project." )
