This week at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) Microsoft showed off their upcoming answer to the Nintendo Wii, code-named Project Natal.

Microsoft is having to play catch up with the Wii with it's simple-to-use controllers but has gone one step further by removing the controller all together - effectively making you the controller! You control your character by acting with your own body and a device sitting under your TV tracks your movements.

Those of you with Play Stations will know that so far this is nothing new. Sony has a product for the Play Station called the Eye-Toy which tracks the player's movements and is supported by a handful of party-style games.

Though I don't own a Play Station I feel fully qualified to say that Project Natal (once they come up with a better name) will be much more successful than the Eye-Toy. I can see a whole bunch of games coming up with inventive uses of it. In the E3 demo they showed a racing game where a kid was steering by moving her hands around an imaginary steering wheel and when she pulled into the pits her dad had to jump up and mime changing her tyres (corny but creative)! Another demo I saw was a paint application where a user would pick a colour then throw imaginary paint onto the TV screen.

With the camera comes facial recognition. So you could set it to automatically log your account into Xbox Live when it sees your face - pretty neat. On top of facial it also supports voice recognition so you could use voice commands to navigate through the Xbox dashboard and speak commands/answers to games.

Although, having said how cool it looks I have to say I have my doubts. In the promo video there seemed to be a bit of lag at times (which I'm not surprised by but would suck) and at other times the character on screen seemed to move before the person did in real life - hmmm, can you say smoke and mirrors?

Also, in reality I'm just not big on this sort of interaction in games. Having played Wii games and consistently having my bowling balls curve into the right gutter no matter how much freaking left spin I put on them I have to say I much prefer the precision and responsiveness of a traditional controller with thumb-sticks/d-pads! Also, can you imagine how much of a work-out this Project Natal will be? I mean at least with Wii Sports you eventually work out you can accomplish those same massive slams you've been doing in Tennis with a simple flick of the wiimote. There will be no cheating like that in Natal though! I can imagine it now, in order to play the next version of Halo, one of the game's requirements will be you being as fit as an actual soldier! I guess I can kiss any gaming prowess I thought I had good-bye! lol

Here's the video I was referring to.

Last night we saw Star Trek at the cinema. I loved the film. Great plot, acting, etc. I only have two problems with it.

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The first is with a little bit of poetic license they’ve taken with the science of black holes. Apparently when a sun going super-nova gets sucked into a black hole it gets crushed into a singularity but when a star-ship goes into a black hole they get hurtled back in time without a scratch. Phew! I just had some minor scratches on my car fixed recently and that was expensive enough - I can only imagine Eric Banner’s relief when the black hole didn’t write off his space ship! They probably cost a bit more than a 04 Magna!

</spoiler-alert>

But I can deal with the black hole thing, I mean how many sci-fi flicks are scientifically accurate? But the thing that really gets me is bloody J.J. Abrams and his fetish for blue lights! I mean we all like blue lights on things right but Abram’s love for them is unnatural! If you’ve ever seen an episode of the TV sci-fi series “Fringe” you may know exactly what I mean. You can’t go one episode of watching Fringe without there being a scene where there is glare from a blue light shining on the camera. It doesn’t matter if it’s dark at night or in the middle of the day. Apparently glare from blue lights is all around us in daily life, although the actual source of the light itself is conveniently out of our view. At first I thought it was mysterious and wondered what it meant, then I thought it was accidental and they just had some amateur lighting technician on the set who kept accidentally pointing a big, blue light at the camera. But now I’m convinced that Abrams is a big blue light whore as Star Trek is filled with them! Even in scenes where there are no phasers firing, stars going super-nova or vintage car’s pointing their headlights directly into the camera, you cannot go 30 seconds without light filling the picture.

Just check out these images I pulled from the trailer! Here is a frame that I was going to photoshop and cover with exaggerated white light.

But it turns out I didn’t have to because a couple seconds later in the trailer a mysterious bright light flooded this scene anyway!

This is constantly happening through the movie and drives me nuts. I’m sure Abrams thinks shining a torch into the camera every 30 seconds is subtle and artistic but to me he’s breaking the forth wall. Every time he does it I remember I’m not a star ship officer in the cool future with flying cars, holodecks and sexy robo-chicks but rather just a nerd watching star trek. Damn you Abrams!!

I noticed the other day that ProgrammingPrimate.com got it’s first spam comment! I find this completely hilarious!

As I understand it, the principle behind these spam comments is that a spammer has a program which autonomously crawls the web and when it comes across a site that it can post a comment on, it posts a generic comment which includes a link back to the spammer’s website. Over time, all these links to the spammer’s website increase the spammer’s site’s PageRank. PageRank is like a popularity score from 0 to 10 that Google calculates based on how many other websites link to that page and what their PageRank is. Put really simply, the higher a website’s PageRank is, the higher it will appear in people’s search results on Google and thus the more visitors they’ll get to their site.

But the thing I find funny is that the home page on my website has a PageRank of zero! lol

So how the hell the spam bot even found my site is a mystery to me let alone why it decided to proceed with the spam comment! If anything the low PageRank of my crappy site will bring down the reputation of the spammer’s website! Haha, joke’s on you spammer man! ;-)