OMG Nintendo

Scribblenauts is due to be one of the big game releases for this week, but somehow a copy leaked earlier this weekend. One enterprising hacker got hold of the ROM and ripped out the full list of words it recognized... and it's [i]long[/i], to the tune of 22,802 words. You can browse a full list here, but beware spoilers (and some rough language from the uploader).

This list by itself could prove that Scribblenauts is going to be one of the year's must-buys. Here's just a very small sample of the frankly insane terms you can still enter into the game in order to create objects that help you solve a wide and crazy variety of puzzles.

• Chicken Nugget
• Dyoplosaurus
• Encephalographer
• Flugelhorn
• Jump Rope
• Miniature Bull Terrier
• Nutritionist
• Parachute Pants
• Registered Nurse

Did you play Tetris when you were little? If so, you've probably got more brain than folks who didn't!

Results of a new study about to be released by the Mind Research Network later this week reveal that playing Tetris regularly not only causes parts of the brain to grow stronger, but it can actually cause a person's total amount of cortex to increase. The findings came from performing CAT scans on a test group of adolescent Tetris-players and a control group of non-players the same age. By the end of the three month test period, the Tetris-players had bigger and better-functioning brains! 

The scientists chalk this up to how a “challenging visuospatial task” can enhance brain function and even alter its structure. Dr. Richard Haier, one of the study's authors, thinks in the future Tetris might be linked to "lasting effects that generalize to other activity." It's even being speculated that regular Tetris play might help people fight off the mental declines that occur as part of the aging process.

So even you old folks reading this-- go play Tetris! You've got no excuses anymore! 

PlayOn is a company that basically sells relatively cheap ($39.99) technology that lets folks use their PC as a media server for purposes of streaming content to their television sets. Some versions of the PlayOn launcher let you tether the signal to one of your video game consoles, essentially turning it into a set-top box through its browser. Today PlayOn announced the release of a beta version of its streaming software for Wii and you may find it's worth your time and money.

All the PlayOn software requires is that you have a PC in the house on, have your Wii pointed at http://www.playon.tv through the Internet channel, and a connection that'll support at least 1.5 to 2.0 Mbps. Download the PlayOn software, make sure you have WMP 11 installed for... some reason, and then start streaming away. Right now you can easily access a very Wii Remote-friendly YouTube interview, Hulu, the CBS library, CNN, ESPN, Netflix streams, and more through the PlayOn open architecture widget.

My home connection meets the PlayOn requirements and I found my streams smooth and pleasant to watch. On my HDTV there was some slight pixelization of picture even on content marked HD, since most web content now only goes up to 720p. There would be occasional moments where you could really tell it was a stream, like slowdown or stuttering, but these moments were brief even during streams of hour-long shows like Star Trek. There were no issues with timeouts, videos not loading, or videos displaying incorrectly.

You can try the PlayOn launcher for free for 14 days before deciding whether or not to drop some money on a full license for the software. If you do, you can use the same license to stream media through your PS3, Xbox 360, or a host of other devices. I actually have to consider this a really good value, especially when you consider how many households have Wiis but not other systems yet. Give it a try, play with it, and see if you think it's worth your time. I'm not sure if I'll be using it enough to warrant buying the software license yet, but the thought has certainly crossed my mind.

If I was the kind of person who hosted Photoshop contests, I'd be hosting one right now.

Silicon Era's been paying attention to the patent applications coming out of Nintendo recently, which led to the recent stories concerning a horseback-riding controller. (Official word from Majesco on that one: "Majesco does not comment on rumors.") Now they've happened across a patent application from Howard Cheng, VP of R&D at NoA, QED, ASAP, concerning a soft and nerflike football controller.

Thankfully, you don't actually throw the thing. Instead, you stick your Wiimote in it and carry it like a football, allowing the built-in sensors to detect your movement. The result: immersive football gaming fun.

Also, propelling nerf footballs through your television screen.

But mostly the fun.

There was a lot of talk about the potential of video games to affect the health of an older person's brain back when Brain Age first came out. Now thanks to the stimulus bill, researchers at NC State and Georgia Tech are taking a more serious look at the power video games might have to keep elderly brains exercised - but they're not studying Brain Age.

Instead the study is focusing on the Wii game Boom Blox, because its "novelty, attentional demand and social interaction may be manipulated by the researchers." The study's ultimate goal is to figure out first what characters a game might possess that could give your grandma's brain a good workout, then figure out how to encourage developers to design a game that would deliberately help old people think better.

This is seriously cool stuff, especially when you consider that a lot of retirement and nursing homes now host Wii systems anyway. It would also require teaching old people that more games exist than Wii Sports, which appears to be a long-overdue lesson in some houses.

There's basically nothing I can say that's as interesting as watching a bunch of engineers control 15-ton metal death claws just by tilting a Wii Remote, so... you know, I'm not even going to try. Just watch and enjoy.

Nintendo's decision to stick with last-gen hardware means it now has a piracy problem that's only rivaled by thriving world of PSP piracy. With the aid of the Homebrew Channel - which does make some seriously cool actual homebrew possible - Wii hackers have now figured out how to get the system to play disc images mounted on an external hard drive. This gives your Wii the same advantage you get when playing a game installed to your Xbox 360 hard drive, namely vastly reduced load times. 

A full tutorial for running this amazing hack is right here. While running games from your Wii hard drive is a bit more difficult than, say, using a WiiKey to get your Wii to read burned disc images, it's definitely really convenient once you've got it runningt. Most Wii game .isos are around 4GBs in size, so a simple 1TB drive will hold all of most people's collection with plenty of room to spare. Of course, ripping Wii disc images is pain, so most people will probably use rips that can be freely torrented off the Internet... and from there it's pretty easy to get in the habit of just not paying for your games at all.

Right now the Wii HD hack is compatible with the latest Wii system firmware, 4.0, so there's really not much Nintendo can do about this for now. It'll be interesting to see if Nintendo focuses on breaking this hack in future firmware updates... or if they just try to take steps to make their next system more pirate-proof. Either way it strikes me as a losing battle.

Piracy is a rampant problem for Nintendo this generation and especially on DS. The ROM images are small and it doesn't take much smarts to get a flash cart working on a DS Lite. So you might think part of the DSi's mission statement to Nintendo would be to let them cut back on DS piracy by using firmware updates to break flash carts.

As we've covered before, this method hasn't worked well on Wii and it's not working any better with DSi... though the method the pirates are using to get around the firmware updates there is novel. The DSONEi is countering Nintendo's official firmware updates with its own pirate firmware updates. If you're using the cart, then just wait for the makers to post a cracked firmware every time Nintendo updates the official firmware.

Of course, there's a big hole to this approach of defeating the DSi's firmware updates: it relies on a central source of getting cracked firmware. If Nintendo opted to hunt down and sue the DSONEi guys out of existence the way they did the R4 guys, then you'll be left without any incoming firmware updates. The R4 itself has trouble working with newer games because its firmware can no longer be officially updated and that seems an even more likely fate for the DSONEi, provided Nintendo can ever hunt these guys down. 

Super Mario Galaxy was a game with some thoroughly memorable sound design, from the burbling voice clips to the jaunty sound effects to... well, the background music, of course! One of the most memorable Super Mario Galaxy songs is Gusty Garden and some enterprising person on YouTube has seen fit to produce an arrangement of it for the Nintendo DS homebrew program Mario Paint Composer. Result: awesome Mario Paint version of an awesome song! Everybody wins! 

Now, someone get cracking on Mario Paint versions of the MadWorld soundtrack...