The week in gadgets


14 Jun 2010

A look at gadget, game and geek happenings in the week ahead.

By far the biggest event of the week in the gadget world is the Electronic Entertainment Expo, otherwise known as E3, and although it has yet to kick off officially some juicy news from Microsoft has already emerged. Project Natal – the controller-less gaming system for the Xbox 360 – has been given its official name and is now called Kinect.

Aside from waxing lyrical on the various features of Kinect, Microsoft did not give much else away but did say this much: later this morning (Monday) the world will know how much Kinect will cost and when it will go on sale.

Wanna hear something even juicier? There are strong indications that Kinect is not going to be the only big news from Xbox because the Xbox 360 console itself is rumoured to have been given a complete redesign, fuelled by an ad on an Italian games site that shows a smaller mini Xbox 360 console.

“I guess you guys aren’t ready for that, yet. But your kids are gonna love it.”

That could have been anyone at E3 demoing Natal to an older generation, but of course it’s a classic quote from Back to the Future when Marty McFly plays a face-melting guitar solo to a room of bewildered 1950s prom kids.

This isn’t a pointless segue way; Back to the Future is going to be made into a series of games by Telltale Games, the geniuses behind the revived Sam & Max, and Monkey Island series.

Telltale Games has made a multi-title video-game development deal with Universal so Back to the Future and Jurassic Park are both going to get the video-game treatment. Nerdy sci-fi fans out there must be so excited that their tears of joy will be enough to fuel the flux-capacitor.

The first game to be released will be one based on Back to the Future.