Sometimes a video is so fascinating, so hypnotic, so awe-inspiringly strange, that it just doesn't leave your head. It stays for days and days, over a whole weekend, while the mind reels at the possibilities. Namco-Bandai's Muscle March is just such a brain injection of oddity.
Japan is a lucky country. It gets titles like Muscle March for WiiWare, while we get to watch YouTube videos instead.
Witness the rainbow-colored bikini briefs and posing polar bears...almost like Punch-Out!!, if Punch-Out!! involved slamming your shirtless body through walls while on psychedelics. The style is reminiscent of the best parts of Katamari Damacy, while not being as completely incomprehensible as Noby Noby Boy.
This conversion of an arcade game (we'll say it again: Japan is a lucky country) hits WiiWare on May 26. We eagerly await a U.S. release. If the Wii had more games like this, perhaps it'd be considered a bit more of a "hardcore" platform. Ahem.
(Via CNET Asia)
(Credit:
Bandai)
What's that about not playing with your food? But seeing as the Noodle Waterslide's from Japanese toymaker Bandai, it does wear the label of "toy." Still, this not only brings back memories of another noodle device, the USB-powered noodle strainer, it's actually a replica of the flowing somen specialty called nagashi somen, which I so wanted to try out while visiting Japan. Too bad this summer delight is found mainly in the Hyogo prefecture.
Here, thin somen is put in water flowing along a long bamboo gutter where you catch the noodles with your chopsticks, dip them in a cold broth, and well, dig in. While plastic doesn't quite replace bamboo, it's one way to have summer somen at home anytime you fancy playing with your food. The Noodle Waterslide just slithered out in Japan for 8400 yen ($85).
The somen starts its journey from the little house at the top of the slide and ends up in a strainer at the bottom.
(Credit: Bandai)(Source: Crave Asia via Tokyo Mango)
(Credit:
Bandai)
Once in a while, toy maker Bandai gains some designer street cred with lifestyle products like its A.i.R. (Art in the Room) Project, or conceived by Japanese media artist Taro Suzuki as "art created from wind and light." You can't miss this in the home section of Tokyu Hands or even The Loft in Japan when this launches on April 25, since the laptop-size device is illuminated by 25 eye-catching LEDs.
At a glance, this looks like a collection of dancing blue lights that illuminate in a number of different patterns. What's less obvious are the four sensors that change the direction of the lights with your hand movements. There's also a built-in timer for the lightbox to come on automatically, particularly when you're planning to impress a date. All very pretty mood lighting, if you don't mind the hefty 52,500 yen ($570) that comes with this. Video following on how this digital light show works.
(Source: Crave Asia via CScout Japan)
More wacky distractions from the idea factory of Japanese toy maker Bandai, this one claiming to utilize nanotech coating that imbues water droplets with mercury-like qualities. Aqua Dance is probably not going to hold your attention for long beyond the initial novelty. But as with anything from the land of weird tech, this immediately carries a special "geek" tag.
We do know this takes off from Aqua Drop, a similar gizmo where you feed water through the top and watch the beads slide, bounce, scatter, or plop into holes along a handheld maze. Can anything be more riveting than watching the way H2O moves?
If this one holds water with you, watch for it in March, in Moon Night or Rainy Day colors. You never know when your friendly gadget shop may just ship this in from Japan.
(Via Crave Asia)
(Credit:
Kohjinsha/Bandai)
What do a Japanese notebook maker and toy manufacturer have in common? Nothing until recently, when Kohjinsha and Bandai teamed up to ride the Netbook popularity wave that's seen almost every major laptop vendor sport one in their stable.
(Credit:
Kohjinsha/Bandai)
The Gachapin & Mukku Netbook has one interesting twist. It's a limited edition, and it's aimed at kids using cartoon characters (a dinosaur and a bigfoot) that Japanese tots are familiar with. Slated for a March rollout at 79,800 yen ($878), this is no toy, however. In fact, the pricing hardly falls into the Netbook comfort zone.
Still, this is one darn cute subnotebook in an appealing lime green casing, with the standard 8.9-inch 1,024x600 display, up to 160GB of HDD, 1GB of RAM, an Atom N270 CPU, and a 1.3-megapixel Webcam.
The onboard 1Seg Digital TV tuner should hint broadly that this is only for Japan, though it'll be interesting to keep tabs on how the Gachapin & Mukku Netbook pits itself against yet another cutesy cartoon icon which may remain silent on the matter, but has her feline claws firmly unsheathed for world domination.
(Via Crave Asia)
Wi-Fi paint? Bust warmer? Face slimming mask? Bandai telling women how to understand men? Why, that's just crazy talk! The Gadgettes are back in the saddle again, and this time, they ain't going anywhere anytime soon.
Listen now: Download today's podcast
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EPISODE 122 |
Made-in-Japan Wi-Fi blocking paint
British Airways to allow in-flight texting
Computer newbs kick QWERTY to the curb
Thanko’s new plug-in bust warmer… whatever next?
Bandai helps women understand men
Japanese face slimmer will definitely not work as advertised
... Read moreInstant cool in the early 1980s: having a car like K.I.T.T. or the Batmobile. Failing that, having an arcade game in your garage.
The specific game changed depending on what they just got in over at Chuck E. Cheese (Star Wars, Crystal Castles, or the environmental cabinet version of Discs of Tron).
All the fun of a pizza party, minus the guy dressed like a rat.
(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)But, unless you were rich or a criminal mastermind, you had to settle for one of two alternatives: either you played similar games on your Atari 2600, or you begged your parents for the handheld versions, some of which were fashioned to look like miniature versions of the arcade cabinets.
Boot Hill was an early arcade game in which you played the classic gunfighter battle. The goal: Shoot the other gunfighter before he shoots you. That was pretty much it.
This gameplay was faithfully brought to the Bandai Electronics Arcade game Gunfighter, which boasts on the box, "All the Challenge and Thrills of Real Arcade Action!"
This game used a vacuum fluorescent display (VFD) rather than LCD or LED, so it had a nice, bright read-out.
Now, you can mock this relatively low-tech approach, but you have to give it credit--it delivers the goods. The game even has a cacti and a stage coach as obstacles between you and your opponent. You can shoot the cacti to get to him, but if you shoot the coach, you lose a point.
You can play against the game itself (with three difficulty levels, no less) or play against a friend. My favorite part is that when you get shot, it plays "funeral music" (dum-dum-de-dum DUM-de-dum-dum-dum-dum-DUM). And it's designed for "Ages 8 and Up."
But how does it hold up now, almost 30 years later? Funny you should ask; I just managed to score a working version of this game for three bucks at a thrift store.
I challenged Senior Editor Bonnie Cha to a duel. It took us a couple seconds to get used to the controls, but after that, the battle was on.
After a few minutes and a handful of, um, colorful metaphors, a victor emerged. I won--37 to 19--and Bonnie was a gracious loser. Well, gracious aside from accusing me of practicing before challenging her, anyway.
Sure, it's just one game, and there's not much to it, but I have to admit, it was fun to play. Score one for the old school.
(Credit:
GeekAlerts)
It's fine with us for the Japanese to continue pursuing a human-free society, but some of their robotic advances are hitting a little too close to home. We began getting uncomfortable upon learning of various blogging functions being taken over by bots, for example, and now there's another one of the little creeps that's reading e-mail and performing other desktop tasks.
Bandai's "Tachikoma" connects to the computer's USB port, helping to "create and process applications" and play games as well as handle the mail, according to GeekAlerts. Judging by the photos and video, this four-legged beast would eat our "i-Buddy" and "Nabaztag" for breakfast.
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(Credit:
Technabob)
There's nothing we hate more on the face of the planet than cockroaches--the mere thought of them can send us into a skin-crawling fit. So we think that the geniuses at Bandai Japan who invented the "Hex Bug" should be shot or, better yet, ordered to serve a life sentence in a gigantic Roach Motel.
Just reading Technabob's description of the $16 bug-bots makes us twitch: "The Hex Bug series of miniature insect robots scurry along on six legs, just like real bugs," and will "change direction when you clap in their vicinity." Gross.
As far as we're concerned, we'd rather be attacked by RC tarantulas. At least we know it's possible to destroy those, unlike roaches, with a shotgun.
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