I've had this idea forever, and at first it sounds like nothing new, but when you see how the pieces fit together you'll recognize it as something a bit more original.

The idea has its origin in a Star Trek exhibit that the Franklin held many years ago. One of the more creatively inspiring things about the exhibit was the user of the LCARS interface elements on each exhibit display. If you're only marginally familiar with Star Trek the Next Generation, you'll know the look of these things on sight. They're really a contrivance for the show, offering no real UX benefit at all, but some computer applications have taken the look of LCARS and used it to produce some interfaces for things, whether they're Star Trek-related or not.

The idea this spawned for me was a video game in which the participant was a student/cadet at Star Fleet Academy. The idea is that there would be a good amount of interesting fiction and story, but the fundamentals of space exploration - read: astronomy - would be taught to the user in an entertaining way. In other words, use the Star trek franchise to actually teach kids real things about space in a fun way. After all, this is the purpose of the Franklin, right?

Well, we all know that Star Trek isn't anything about honest-to-goodness space exploration, so the melding of those ideas probably wouldn't stick. But the idea of educational software on the topic of astronomy tied with a franchise has always been an interesting thought for me. Moving on to the present day...

I have this application on the iPad called Star Walk. Star Walk is in essence a map of the sky. What makes it interesting is that it uses the internals of the iPad (there's a version for the iPhone, too) to make the map live and interactive. The end effect is this: If you hold the iPad up to the night sky, you see an overlay of labels and constellations on the astronomical bodies that exist behind your view of the iPad itself. It's like putting an educational overlay on the sky.

I could speculate as to how this works, using the iPad's internal sensors - the GPS, accelerometers, and compass - to figure out what's behind it. But the main thing is that the pad becomes a transparent device to the universe behind it. People might call this artificial reality, and that's fine and good, although I think that the term is a nice buzzword for "I'm going to sell you crap by showing you new places to buy things" than anything else, but it's useful for explaining this whole game idea I promised in the title.

Because if you look at the capabilities of these devices, there are enough sensors on board and enough processing power and enough display capability that you can do something that I think is pretty neat.

So imagine that you're Johnny, maybe 9-12 years old. You're going on another of those annoyingly long trips to wherever that your parents always drag you on. You love Star Wars/Trek and space, and you like to play video games.

Your mom or dad loans you their iPad for the trip. On the iPad is a game that, having been pre-programmed by mom/dad, knows the GPS route that you will take in the car. But instead of showing you real things as you pass them in the car (which could still be pretty neat), it turns outside scenery into astronomical features of a video game.

The Starbucks? An intergalactic energy station. The McDonalds'? An enemy stronghold.

Hold the iPad up to the windows an look "ouside" the ship (car) to see what's going on outside. Maybe this is a material collection game. Maybe it teaches you about astronomy as you go. There are a lot of options, and the "game board" would be helpfully generated by actual real-world places.

The best part, for the parents, is that the game knows when the kid has reached the "dock" destination, and doesn't have to fight the kid to turn the iPad over when you reach Grandma's.

The game doesn't have to be exclusively astronomy-oriented, either. It could be a safari or some other kind of Earthly adventure. There are plenty of skins you could put on the game to change the angle of presentation and type of education imparted. Or it could simply be all fun, rather than impart any direct education at all.

The main potential blocker I see is the ubiquity of parents willing impart their iPads to a kid for long car or train (plane?) trips. It would be useful if the next Nintendo portable had some external sensors or the capability to connect to external sensors wirelessly for this purpose.

When this type of game comes to market, I'm going to have Berta do most of the long-distance driving.

I was bumbling around the console game section of Best Buy last week looking for a bigger XBox hard drive when I saw this strange little game on the shelf. The trend these days is toward creating games that have you doing something other than sitting in a chair pushing buttons with minute hand twitches and drying eyeballs. You're In The Movies is a unique game in that genre.

The game is packaged differently because it comes with a small USB video camera. This is a shame because I has already (for some reason) bought the XBox video camera, and now I have two. I didn't see a copy of the game without the camera, and this box was shelved in a different location because of the non-standard game box.

The game's object... There is a point system. That's hardly the point of the game though. I think I'd be better off describing what you do in the game, and what the end product is.

Gameplay basically consists of performing a series of minigames by moving around in front of the camera. Like Sony's eye-toy for the Playstation, the Xbox superimposes the video it captures from the camera, and "sees" when you're moving and touching things on the screen.

I'm not sure how sophisticated the eye-toy software is, but in You're In The Movies, the game takes a moment to capture a clean shot of the "set" with none of the players in front of the camera. With this clean shot, it is able to reasonably remove the background from the shot and show only the player on-screen with none of the background. This is very useful and required for this game to do what it does.

To start the game, you position yourself on-screen inside of one of four silhouettes. Each one is labeled with the role you will play. This positioning is also used to take the photo for your avatar throughout the game, which is superimposed on a Hollywood-style star. Any role not filled by a player is played by one of several pre-recorded people built-into the game.

The minigames are silly little things like running away from charging bulls, turning a valve wheel, and punching various on-screen bad guys or targets. One or two players play a game at a time, and the games come in groups of three "acts", between which the players' progress in the game is shown. There are quite a few games, and each of them is reasonably entertaining and/or challenging. But that's not really the fun part.

After you compete with up to three other players at the minigames, You're In The Movies produces a cheesy B-movie trailer using the clips it captured while you were playing the game.

So that valve you were closing? Yeah, that's you sitting behind the wheel of a car. That bull you were running away from? Now it's zombies. Punching targets? Crashing through a science lab as a giant monster of death.

At the end of the sets of minigames, you watch your movie and are given the option to save it to the XBox drive and even send it to your XBox Live account for later download. I have downloaded one of the videos I made with Abby and Riley, and uploaded it to Viddler to attach to this post. The manipulation of the movie files went surprisingly smoothly -- no weird DRM, no strange formats, no locked-in flash/silverlight formats.

When the movie screening is complete, the game tallies the points from the minigames and shows an Academy Awards-style ceremony. The winner gets to make a few winning remarks from the podium to a cheering crowd.

The chroma-key technique the game uses is both sophisticated and incomplete. It's somewhat challenging to light the set properly so that the cutout algorithm works perfectly. There's an amusing little training video at the start of the game that explains how to do all this. I think our family room is simply not rigged with good lighting.

The movies themselves are pretty varied. There are many genres to choose from, all pretty cheesy. When you've completed enough movies, a "director" feature becomes enabled that allows you to assemble existing scene components to create a movie of your own, complete with custom voice-over via a standard Xbox Live headset.

The game seems to have the ability to download new movie content, which would be a great expansion to this game. We haven't completed all of the movies in the system yet, but we're getting close. I would love to see some useful new set components for director's mode, as well as some additional pre-assembled movies.

This game is just fun. And it's one of the more creative games I've seen for the XBox lately. I'm not sure how much more you can do with the camera, but this certainly makes the purchase worthwhile. Hopefully they produce more content for this game, and make some more games that make creative use of the camera like this one.

Please enjoy the movie we made, Vampire Villas:

I'm a subscriber to Pyramid magazine, and some days I think the only reason I have to do so is because it's an inexpensive, consistent flow of game news. It's because of articles like the one I read today that I fail to fathom why I continue to pay them at all when less expensive tripe can be obtained more abundantly from many other sources.

The article in question is available only to subscribers (sorry), but involves a game that I discovered while meandering around the exhibit floor at Origins. The game is Rock! by Out of the Box Publishing, and is one of the more interesting new card games I saw while at the game fair.

Here is the summary of what the article said about the game, Rock!, besides ranting for several paragraphs about the quality of the materials from which the game was built:

Sadly, the artwork and the tin are the best features this item has to offer. … Alas, Rock! doesn't really rise above its "source material," and the underlying game is an inexpensive way to pay too much for what amounts to a gimmick.

Not only does that make no sense ("inexpensive way to pay too much"?), but it's outright wrong. Let me explain what Pyramid completely overlooked about this game.

Rock! is a fast card game, somewhat in the style of Out of the Box's other popular game, Blink, which they have since sold the rights to Hasbro. The game consists simply of a deck of cards with artistic renderings of the classic components of Roshambo - rock, paper, or scissors.

The game is played by splitting the cards evenly between two players. The players simultaneously flip a card from the top of their decks onto the play surface, revealing the image on the card face. The cards are be compared mentally upon their revelation, and the winner of the standard game is known. But the person who threw the winning card of the pair is not the winner! The winner is the person who can call out the winning card first.

This seems really easy based solely on this description. It is a lot more difficult than it sounds. Consider the cards below.

You can see that discerning which item a card represents can be challenging even before trying to figure out which item wins. The images are deceiving. Some of the paper images look like they could be rocks at first glance. Some of the rocks look like they could be paper. The scissor images are all over the map. It's definitely not as simple as having a single image for each card type, which would indeed make the game no challenge.

The first time you play it, there is a significant novelty factor. It doesn't dawn on you that the images are going to be that difficult to discern. Even after the first play, it's a challenge.

You can imagine that there are many false calls in the game. If you call a throw falsely, your opponent wins the set. This adds a bit of strategy to the game. Can you trust to let your opponent simply name the wrong winner? Sometimes you can!

In the case of a tied game, you flip another card. You can also flip another card if you can't decide between the players who won a throw.

Yes, the game is pretty simple. It could be emulated by a deck of regular cards, but you'd completely lose the aspect of discerning the nature of the artwork on the card. This aspect makes the card art a requirement for the uniqueness of the game, not just an amusing bonus, as characterized by the Pyramid article.

Regarding the quality of the product, I'm not sure what the reviewer was looking for in a deck of cards. The cards are of no worse quality than the ones Out of the Box produced for Blink, which similarly to my Rock! cards, have withstood many games with adults slamming hands and children shuffling indiscriminately. The reviewer must not have played the game extensively (the rules of which don't prescribe slapping any cards down, unlike what is written in the article), and I can't imagine he would have given his complete disregard for the game, almost entirely based on its card stock weight and perceived lack of originality.

Rock! is a great little game, easily traveled, simple to teach to kids who already know rock-paper-scissors, and well worth the price for the quality artwork, unique game concept, and sturdy travel container.

The review is one of the shoddiest pieces of reporting I've seen on Pyramid, a publication that would seem to pride itself on showing the uniqueness of games. Being that I've based dismissal of some newer games on things I've read in Pyramid reviews, I'm wondering what else I've been missing by paying heed to such reviews.