Lusipurr.com – Presenting the Sundry Opinions of Lusipurr and Friends

Because of Parkinson's.

Fat Women With Tremors? Nate Has a Date!

Readers and contributors to Lusipurr.com unanimously agree: Wii Fit is not a game. You can try to answer the question “what is the end goal?” but the answer is always “so I can pretend I exercised and thus justify these ten cheeseburgers.” While that may be a hilarious answer, it does not make it a game. However, it can be used as a medical diagnostic tool……well, for something other than telling you how obese you are. A 54-year-old woman in England was playing the game with friends when the balance board told her she was leaning heavily on her left side. This seemed to get worse over time and spread to other limbs, her right hand suddenly taking over roles that she’d always done left-handed. Taking all this into consideration, she went to her doctor and was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a mere six months after playing Nintendo’s favorite ass waggle gimmick. Amusingly enough, she said that she does not use the Wii Fit anymore, but it is unknown whether that is due to the limitations of her disease, or she was tired of jumping around only to get nagged by a white square of plastic.

The cerebellum is moe now.

Suck At Video Games? Blame Your Crappy Brain

What do you do when you have an inferiority complex combined with too much money and too much free time? If you are a researcher for the University of Ohio, the obvious answer is to look at your life’s failings and try to find a scapegoat. Psychology professor Dirk Bernhardt-Walther developed an experiment to justify his inferiority by focusing in on a central part of the brain, the basal ganglia, which is responsible for procedural learning, coordinated movement, and reward recognition. With the help of the University of Illinois’s computer engineering department, the video game Space Fortress was created, in which the players must destroy a fortress without losing their own ship to one of the many hazards presented, forcing them to frequently shift their attention. The players were given an MRI before the experiment then were allowed 20 hours to learn the game, their scores kept track of throughout the learning process. After tabulating the results, it was found that certain players had a predisposition to simply learn the material better than the other players. Those whose MRI scans showed more activity in the sections tied to learning and movement rather than reward typically had a quicker increase in score as well as a higher overall score. The researchers are careful to not discourage people entirely, saying that this cannot be interpreted to mean that people are destined to fail or succeed, that the malleability of the brain can make up for this…but this is Lusipurr.com, we prefer to believe that some of us are just awesome by anatomy alone and others are inferior.

How did a plumber get his MD?

Even Single-Celled Organisms Are Better Than You!

With even less time on their hands than the guys at Ohio, the guys at Stanford have gone a step further in making insane video games. Physicist and professor of bioengineering Ingmar Reidel-Kruse took several paramecium and put them in a fluid chamber hooked up to a camera, which then transmits the data to a computer which superimposes images like blocks or goals to complete the game. Using a standard gaming controller, the player’s inputs into the device will create either an electrical or chemical stimuli that will cause the paramecium to react and move towards or away from the stimulus. In this manner, the player controls the paramecium, acting as a player in a game of soccer or a moving bar for block breaking. Another version of the game goes even further and operates on the molecular level. Reidel-Kruse does concede that his purpose is not to create bionic video games for entertainment, but rather for educational value. He argues that with the pace at which bioengineering technology is advancing, “everyone should have sufficient knowledge about the basics of biomedicine and biotechnology. Biotic games could promote that.”

Microsoft Kinect Humping Technology!

You Are Seriously Lazy

So we have discovered so far that you are so diseased, fat, and moronic that you resort to using germs to play your video games for you. Luckily, I know just the thing that will make our slovenly bastard readers stand right up…no no, not breasts, but mecha! Everyone loves robots, Japan loving robots more than anyone else. Japan also likes taking everything Microsoft gives them and toying with it to make it superior, so it should come as no surprise that the Kinect has quickly been modified to fit other functions. First, it was simple motion capture for making cute anime girls dance, or for molesting cute anime girls but let’s ignore that. But now, Japan’s robotics hobbyists have taken things to another level of awesomeness by coordinating the Kinect to control their little mechanical buddies. V-Sido, the program used to control mini mechs for a wide variety of other tasks, coordinates very well with the Kinect while staying within the robot’s abilities, i.e. not falling over when the player becomes unbalanced. A YouTube video can be seen here. The only question that remains is why none of our staff have broken down and bought a Kinect yet.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 15th, 2011 at 11:00 and is filed under Editorials, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.