Video Game Summer Camp: Awesome or Awful?

Blue skies and warm temperatures means only one thing: Video game summer camp. The University of British Columbia is offering a week-long summer camp where kids can play video games. Alright, not for the whole day but 3 hours a day.

For $140 CAD, kids will devote time to the Wii, the PlayStation, and assorted video games for a portion of the day. Not to worry, they won’t spend the rest of the day inside. They’ll have the opportunity to play ping pong or foosball and eventually they’ll be booted outside. As a bonus, they’ll be field trips to local video game companies where kids can meet designers and see where the magic happens.

UBC summer camp manager Kyle Cupido says the camp ran last year and is a good fit for kids who might not like the other programs.

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Play through Super Mario Bros as Mega Man?

Chances are you haven’t picked up a controller to play Super Mario Bros in a long time. True the game is a classic, but once you’ve breezed through the Mushroom Kingdom a few times the game loses its lustre. Enter Newgrounds user ExplodingRabbit and his Mario mashup.

ExplodingRabbit has created the Super Mario Crossover flash game which allows you to play through the original game as a different character. You can play as Simon Belmont, Link , Samus, Mega Man, and Bill from Contra. Of course each character has their own signature weapon.

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Shoot Me In The Face With A Cupcake

Life is better with cupcakes, so why not load one in a cannon and shoot yourself in the face? Oh, and while you’re at it, can you capture it in slow motion with a great soundtrack?

Johnny Cupcakes, the hipster-cool-indie t-shirt designer, made the video with Kamp Grizzly as part of Cupcake’s current “suitcase tour” selling shirts around the States. Even if you don’t like his shirts, there’s something undeniably wonderful about slow motion cupcakes to the face.

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Man Beats Bejeweled After Playing For 3 Years

Do you play Bejeweled a lot? Probably not as much as Mike Leyde. The California steel contractor has been playing a single round of Bejeweled 2 now for three years. he didn’t play straight, rather in spurts working out to about for 2,205 hours and 51 minutes worth of play.

During his time he collected 4,872,229 gems, and earned the highest possible score which is 2,147,483,647. Once he reached that score the score display went blank.

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Twitter, Chavez–Chavez, Twitter

Wait a sec, now? Wasn’t it just a few months ago that Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez was calling Twitter a terrorist threat? And didn’t he want to put a stop to gaming? But now, Mr. Chavez is all hip to the jive. While he may not be picking up Call of Duty any time soon, the president has taken to Twitter with the verified account of @chavezcandanga. As of publication, he already has 113,143 followers.

You’ll need to speak Spanish to read all two of Chavez’s tweets, but, rest assured every tweet is a 140 character update on the fight for socialist victory. Translated, his first tweet said “Hey how’s it going? I appeared like I said I would: at midnight. I’m off to Brazil. And very happy to work for Venezuela. We will be victorious!!”

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Canadians to Get Their Hands on Acer Liquid E “Soon”

Acer is getting close to launching its first handheld for the North American market, the Acer Liquid E, and it will be only available on Rogers (at least in Canada). In the latest issue of URmagazine, which happens to be a Rogers publication, an article was published describing a full list of all its features with a friendly reminder that it’s “coming soon”.

The Acer Liquid E features a 3.5 inch HD display, 5 mega pixel camera, and support for html5. It will also be the first Rogers device to take advantage of the latest Android 2.1 OS.

It’s interesting Acer has chosen Canada as the North American launch market. Unfortunately no release date has been officially announced for the handheld.

[URmagazine]

Microsoft Kills Dual Screen Tablet

It was hard not to get excited over “Courier”, the dual screen tablet Microsoft was working on. After all two screens are better than one right? Unfortunately it will never see the light of day. Microsoft has pulled the plug on the device that was supposed to be released sometime in 2011.

“At any given time, we’re looking at new ideas, investigating, testing, incubating them. It’s in our DNA to develop new form factors and natural user interfaces to foster productivity and creativity. The Courier project is an example of this type of effort. It will be evaluated for use in future offerings, but we have no plans to build such a device at this time.” says Corporate Vice President Frank Shaw.

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Nasa Space Balloon Crashes into SUV

A multi-million dollar scientific space balloon has bit the dust, and has taken an SUV with it. The NASA sponsored project was supposed to launch this week, and although conditions seemed ideal something went wrong. Very wrong.

Moments after take off scientists seemed to lose control of the balloon. The balloon lifted off  carrying with it a payload of scientific equipment, but the balloon drifted causing the payload to be dragged across the ground right into a nearby vehicle.

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Gizmodo to Sue Police Over iPhone Raid?

Bloggers and techies alike were stunned to hear police recently raided the home of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen over the “stolen” iPhone prototype. But the question still looms, will Gizmodo sue? Sounds like they very well could.

Thomas R. Burke, a media lawyer says the option “is available because search is not the appropriate method in this situation.”

The issue is over newsroom searches. Federal and state law generally provides journalists and bloggers with substantial protections by curbing searches of journalists workspaces. Chen works from his home and considers it his office. That of course makes the search warrant questionable.

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Mysterious Figure Appears on God of War Teaser Site

Who dat man? That’s the question gamers are asking themselves today after a mysterious figure appeared on the Spartansstandtall God of War teaser website.

If you’ve played through God of War 3 and received the platinum trophy you probably noticed a url on the bottom of the screen. Typing it into your web browser takes you to Spartans Stand Tall where until now you saw an image on driving wind and rain.  As of today that image has been updated to show the reflection of what looks like a man in the rain water collecting on the ground.

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