Catching up with Ellie
By One Switch
Earlier this month I had the great pleasure of meeting up with Ellie and her family at the superb Little Havens Children's Hospice where she was taking a break. We wanted to find out if her loan-library Wii Lite controller was still working well. Turns out it still works just fine for her. Enough to beat me three times out of three on Mario Kart.
Attractor HD
By Bill (R&D, SpecialEffect)
iPad - The Game Kitchen/ AccessAble Games
Attractor, previously released on PC, is now playable on the iPad! Accessable Games and The Game Kitchen have, as ever, ensured that the game is accessible to a wide range of players by including some tip top accessibility settings.
Two methods of gameplay are available with either a direct touch on the screen to interact with an icon or a 'touch anywhere' option which uses a touch to start the scanning (and which also stops movement of the gameplay objects) of the gameplay icons and a second touch to select. In addition, there are five gameplay speeds to choose from and also a high contrast mode which turns all gameplay objects black and the background white.
Adapted Remote Controlled Car Controller
By Bill (R&D, SpecialEffect)
SpecialEffect started working with Callum last summer on accessing his PS3 to play his favourite genre of video games: racing. He also asked us about whether we knew how he may be able to do one of his other hobbies again, racing RC cars.
Consequently, we got in contact with Mark Heath, who turned out to be the right man for the job. Mark was able to adapt the controller from the now standard controls of turning a small wheel on the side of the controller to steer the car, whilst using a trigger on the underside of the controller to accelerate and brake to just using one small joystick (that of a Wii nunchuck) to steer left and right as well as accelerate and brake. This enabled Callum to have full control of the car using his chin.
The Simpsons Arcade Game
By Gavin (R&D SpecialEffect)
Xbox 360 & PS3 – Backbone Entertainment published by Konami
Friday, 3 February 2012 was an epic day for Gavin Tan of Southend on Sea, Essex (me that is), as The Simpsons Arcade Game was released on Xbox Live. It doesn’t sound like a momentous event, but I have been waiting a very long time to own a legitimate port of this game, and now I’m able to.
Back when Konami first released The Simpsons Arcade Game in 1991, Simpsons mania was rampant and luckily/lazily enough it was very similar to The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade Game (that Konami released a couple of years before). I say luckily, as being similar to one of the best four player side-scrolling beat ’em ups of all time isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Back in those days we were all crazy about The Simpsons, and seeing our hunger for anything Simpsons related, developers and publishers churned out Simpsons themed video games at an unbelievable pace, 10 of them being released from 1991 to 1993. However, none of them even came close to matching the quality of the original arcade game with a-lot of them being down-right terrible. But what could we do? We were all nuts for this cartoon family so we bought them. I was so infatuated with the cartoon, that I sank dozens of hours into the Amiga 500 version of Bart Vs the Space Mutants, even though it was truly, truly awful. All we really wanted was to own the original arcade game, but it just wasn’t released, not until some 21 years later.
Scribblenauts Remix
By Gavin (R&D SpecialEffect)
iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad - 5th Cell and Iron Galaxy Studios published by Warner Bros. Entertainment
When I first heard about Scribblenauts, in the run up to its release in 2009, I was blown away by the scope of its ambition. The concept of being able to type almost anything into a game and it being able to produce it was an impressive one. I was of course sceptical, because as I think I’ve mentioned before I’m a rather jaded old man, and also because I understood that it’s an astronomical task for someone to basically go through the dictionary, pick out every noun, craft each one and plonk them into a game. I was definitely in the mindset of “I will believe it when I see it!” although I couldn’t help but admire the developer’s aspirations.
When the game was released it was met with middling review scores. The majority of people complaining that it was too hard to control the main character ‘Maxwell’ accurately and so too easy for him to accidently fall into trouble. So I put Scribblenauts on my “If I get a chance to play it great, but if I don’t I won’t be too bothered” list.
But, when I
saw Scribblenauts Remix recently on the App Store, selling for a
modest price, I thought (like I’m sure a-lot of other people
have) “why not? It costs less than a pint, so if it’s rubbish it
doesn’t really matter”.
The Global Game Jam
By One Switch"The Global Game Jam (GGJ) is the world's largest game jam event. A project of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), it occurs annually in late January, and brings together thousands of game enthusiasts, participating in hundreds of local jams around the world. Attendance at each site might be anywhere from 1-300, though is typically 5-25 people, usually students, though many professional game developers and other interested hobbyists attend as well. The structure of a jam is usually that everyone gathers on Friday afternoon, watches a short video keynote with advice from leading game developers, and then a secret theme is announced. All sites worldwide are then challenged to make games based on that same theme, with games to be completed by Sunday afternoon".
This year Game Accessibility was a consideration, with thanks to Tara Volker and Ian Hamilton of the IGDA Game Accessibility Special Interest Group and with long-arm support from SpecialEffect.
Switchamajig
By One SwitchAlthough the iPad is not presently a very good platform for switch access for a variety of reasons, it seems that it can be an excellent switch itself when paired to a Switchamajig. The video above pretty much explains it all. Very nice!
Switch Accessible Radio Controlled Cars
By One SwitchThere are a number of Radio Controlled cars available that have been made more accessible, such as the switch adapted Hitari Tumbler above. Beyond the fun of driving them into people's legs, they can be used to play 10-pin bowling with tin-cans, have the wheels coated in paint for art-creation, set-up for races and stunt courses and so on. Read on for more...
Flexzi2 Mounting Solution
By One Switch
We've just seen that MERU's brand-new Double Flexzi / Flexzi 2 are available on eBay UK. Available in Hot Pink, Electric Green or Midnight Black in three different sizes, with velcro or clamp base. They look like a very nice solution for heavier items. The lovely thing about these mounts is that they are simple to position and look good.
Fox Vs Duck
By Gavin (R&D SpecialEffect)
iPod/iPhone (Sadly I don't think there's an iPad version) - Supermono Limited
In Fox Vs Duck someone is, for whatever reason, endlessly dropping innocent little baby ducks one after the other into the centre of a pond. Who knows why? I guess that in some parts of the world there just isn’t that much to do.
Anyway, the problem is that in this pond lives a hungry carp and circling it there’s a hungry fox, and your job as Mr Nice Guy, is to try and guide them to any spot of safe, dry land that you can find, while avoiding the little quackers getting eaten along the way. You do this by simply tilting your iPod or iPhone back and forth, left and right. The sensation being, something like rolling slightly fluffy marbles around a large, flat dinner plate.
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