I cant believe no one had done this before, if you had asked me I’d sworn I’d seen this some years ago. A group of researchers from Colorado University took a group of Roombas, those cheap, charming and delightfully exploitable vacuuming robots, and turned them into a gigantic Pac-Man game, complete with user controlled Pac-Man, Furtive ghosts and many, many dots.

Now how about someone sets one of these lose in the highway for a quick game of Roomba Frogger?

[Gizmodo]

Lets get away from E3 for a bit to watch something that wasn’t made by a big company, no multi-million dollar budget, hell its not even exactly legal. This is Mega Man 2.5, a homebrew game in development by Peter Sjostrand. The game, much like Paper Mario, gives a 3D twist to a 2D word. Based mainly on Mega Man 2 with a co-op mode based on Mega Man 3. This is the kind of project that shows the talent of rogue homebrew developers, too bad most of them don’t survive a Cease and Desist from the original company.

Capcom, give this guy a job, I’d pay for this.

[Peter Sjostrand / Via Offworld]

Think you’re so good at Dance Dance Revolution that when you’re on the dance pad people say you are on fire? I bet not like this. This is Dance Dance Immolation, the long overdue combination of two things that should have never been appart: DDR and flamethrowers.

The folks from Boing Boing TV bring us a close look at this art project where you play DDR but if you miss a single step you get your face stuffed with fire. A product of the art collective Interpretive Arson, this project has been in the works for a few years now  and is doing rounds on art festivals and maker events. I dont know about you but I’d pay good money to play this. Actually, I’d pay even more to see my enemies play it, without the flame suit. Two men come in, dinner comes out.

I propose the new Mad Max movie has this instead of the thunderdome.

[Interpretive Arson / Via BB TV]

It is only every so often that a game hack comes around that is so brilliant, so glaringly obvious that it boggles the mind why it was never official. Such is the case of this Katamary Damacy trackball mod by Kelly Farrell of the Hacker Collective NYC Resistor. With a little ingenious hardware hacking Kelly managed to control The Prince and his Katamari with a big metal ball placed above some ball bearings.

Why was a custom controller for the game never released is beyond my comprehension. In any case we get an awesome retro hardware mod by a very tallented hacker girl, what else can we ask for?

[Kellbot / Via Offworld]

We’ve seen people mess with the wiimote’s hardware ever since it came out but we’ve rarely seen such real life applications as in this video. This is a huge touchscreen the people from The Evolution Control Committee made out of two wiimotes, a projector and a couple of other awesome little hacks. The end result is a fully functional touchscreen that’s used to generate some bitchin’ mashup tracks. But still, companies refuse to see the reason for homebrew.

[Boing Boing]

Who the HELL do you think we are?! You cant keep us down, not for long at least! We are back online guys! Boy those were some very interesting 24 hours. Hacking is not fun when you’re the victim kids! In the end with the help of some very powerful linux wizards we managed to battle the evil away.

As a result of this you may notice some slight cosmetic errors on the site for a while until we clean up the debris of war. The biggest casualty were the forums which had to take one for the team and went down in a blaze of glory. They will be back in the near future anyway.

So what did you guys do while we were away?

Despite there having been Wii modchips for quite a while it by no means unlocked the full potential of the Wii but a couple of days ago at the 24th Chaos Communication Congress, a delightful meeting of hackers and other hardcore tinkerers, Michael Steil and Felix Domke demonstrated the work they had been doing with the Wii as you can see in the video above.

Beyond the technical mumbo-jumbo they were able to extract the security keys for running code on the Wii and therefore enabled the user to run homebrew software on the console. Although at the most basic level of development right now this means that free Wii homebrew is now a reality and might render better fruits before Nintendo’s WiiWare does. As of now the most popular console on the market is wide open and now anything is possible.

• Did you want to use a hard drive through your USB port? Now its possible.
• Did you want to turn your Wii into a media center? Now its possible.
• Geek enough to want Linux on your Wii? Now its possible.
• Wanted to play old GCN games with your wiimote? Now its possible.
• Wanted to synch your Wii to your PC? Now its possible.
• Dreamed of some hot Wii on DS action? Now its possible.

While this is old news for other consoles the Wii enjoys massive user base and its hardware is cheap making hackers and would-be coders more likely to work on projects. Remember when the iPod was finally cracked? Well this is pretty much that all over again. Just give it some months folks, things are about to get fun.

Well, it seems the saying “when there is a will, there is a way” holds especially true for hackers with too much time on their hands. Users of the ScoreHero online guitar hero score database community have reportedly developed “a tool used for injecting CUSTOM SONGS into GH2 for the xbox 360!”. This short video shows “No One Like You” ripped right out of the PS2’s “Encore rock the 80’s edition” inserted into a custom disc being played on the 360. Now before you get excited at the prospect of tearing up your favorite Dream Theater or Metallica tracks on your 360, it is noted by the developer of the tool that you must have a modded xbox 360 to be able to play these custom discs. This of course, will void your warranty and likely get you permanently banned from live. Is it worth it to play custom tracks with Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band around the corner? Who knows, but it certainly says a lot of the tenacity and ingenuity of today’s amateur programmers out there to break all of the protection the 360 has in place.

[ScoreHero Forums]

One thing was fairly obvious when Nintendo came out saying that the Wii would use standard size DVDs, piracy would be taking it up a notch on Nintendo. And leave it to a few entrepreneurial geeks to come up with a functional Modchip.

This is the Wiinja, from the creators of the DS Micro Ninja. It loads Wii game backups on standard DVD-R. The video mentions the website Wiinja.com but it seems to be offline. Not to worry though because there’s already a second Wii modchip out there!

Enter CycloWiz, a Wii modchip. MaxConsole claims it plays Wii backups, GCN backups, GCN Homebrew software, and some sort of stealth mode. The website for CycloWiz, Teamcyclops.com, is just a splash page.

So we’ve got two Wii modchip and no definite proof of either, go internet!

[Joystiq / Maxconsole]

It was bound to happen, the jokes had been there ever since the controller was unveiled. It was just a matter of time until someone found a way to make the Wiimote into as a sex toy. Named the Wiibrator it doesn’t actually turn the wiimote into a sex toy per se, but rather turns it into a controlling interface for the other famous gaming sex toy: the PS2 Rez Trance Vibrator.

By executing certain movements and at different intervals the Trance Vibrator sends rhythmic (or spastic) pulses to the willing subject. Girls neglected by their significant others in favor of gaming can now fight back. Just be sure to scream “level up!” ever so often to keep them on the grind, literally.

[The Wiibrator]