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If you are a Wiiboy (or Wiigirl?) then Kirby’s Return is a no brainer, well worth the hours of fun playtime you will most likely get out of it, because lets face it, Kirby was always for the young.

Now if you are a gamer looking for something more than a flashy bootscreen with a Rosetta colored hero that jumps a lot of plants and inhales his enemies, Kirby will most likely be completely lost on you.

Kirby has been around since the NES and even managed to make his way on to the Sega Mega Drive a few times, the guy sure gets around.

Key feautres of Kirby’s Return to Dreamland, well, they are not very ground-breaking:

• You run around, sometimes with an oversized sword.
• There are enemies to jump over and plants to collect.
• Transform from regular Kirby by swallowing enemies.
• Use swallowed powers in unique ways to complete the levels.

Once you enter the multiplayer co-op you will realise that the game was meant to be played with others. The multiplayer version of turns the Return to Dreamland on its head, opening up a new experience.

The co-op 4 player mode is chaotic, equally in lunancy to the antics you get involved in with Super Marios Bro.s Wii, with players getting in each others way and generally causing havoc for one another.

The AI ramps up its attacks in multi player mode, increasing the amount of action that is on the screen at one time. Chaos will be had!

As far as platform games go, Kirby’s Return to Dreamland is exactly what you would expect. Co-op multi-player is also very fun, in a way.

The level design is where Kirby’s Return to Dremland comes up very short. The approach appears to incorpoated a real lack of thought with levels playing out in a very linear fashion and only a few ‘secret’ levels being discoverable.

Ahh, the days of the behind the screen secret Mario cheats are well behind us.

Good luck in the future Kirby, hopefully we will see you on the Nintendo Wii-U with its updated graphics engine.

Via [1UP] 

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FouadtjuhMaster has updated his PSP homebrew Mario Kart game. Its a look down 2d view of this Nintendo classic. This new update fixes a couple up bugs and increases level 7 by 25%.

Mario Kart PSP V2.1 Beta 1 changelog:

Fixed the French?! bug.
Updated LVL 7 (25%) bigger.
Fixed 10% of the Waluigi Bowser Bug
Added a PIC0.

Source: Wololo forums

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As many of you are aware we spent a few extra weeks fine tuning our RGH (Reset Glitch Hack) product – the CoolRunner – to make sure that the design was as optimized as possible (If you have been following our forum updates you will know that went through five different prototypes and pounded the mod in our labs to squeeze out every bug) we could find. We have completely changed the layout of the design as well as tweaked the install method and also designed some very sweet QSB’s for both phat and slim that enable both the CoolRunner and the NAND-X to connect to the Xbox at the same time with minimum effort. Boot times on all versions are fast and rock solid. For those who waited for a non-rushed RGH mod – you will not be disappointed.

The CoolRunner will be complete with all wires required. Each wire is cut to precise lengths and correct gauges and also pre-tinned. It is absolutely necessary to use these as instructed to provide optimum performance

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These are instructions on how to get Siri to recognize the names of your contacts. This is especially useful for names that are difficult to pronounce or are said different from how they’re spelled.

Step One
Launch Contacts from your Springboard or from the MobilePhone app.

Step Two
Select a contact from your address book.

Step Three
Press the Edit button at the top right of your screen.

Step Four
Scroll down and select Add Field from the list of buttons.

Step Five
Choose Phonetic First Name or Phonetic Last Name from the list of possible fields.

Step Six
Enter the phonetic pronunciation of the name that Siri isn’t recognizing then press the Done button at the top right of your screen.

NICKNAME
You can also get Siri to recognize and refer to a contact or yourself using an entirely different name by adding a Nickname field to the contact entry.

[via TiPb]

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Pop the red fur balls. Save the blue ones. Seems simple enough — until you start really digging into the depths of Aiko Island, a physics-driven iOS puzzle game that challenges your mind almost as much as it exercises your thumbs.

There’s a serious glut of physics puzzle games on iOS, mostly thanks to the immense popularity of Angry Birds. Aiko Island rivals the furious avians in both addiction and accessibility, offering some challenging levels and a bouncy physics engine that two-man indie developer IceFlame took quite a while to create.

“We spent quite a while tying [the physics] down, making things feel about right,” developer Jonathan Shaw said to Wired.com. The pair only started designing the game’s levels once the engine felt perfect.

Aiko Island, released earlier this month for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, is an adorable, addictive puzzler that gets harder and harder as you play. It’s solid for both short subway rides and extended gaming sessions.

The gameplay is heavily inspired by the Flash game Red Remover. You pop various obstacles on the screen in an attempt to wipe out the evil Red Aiko without accidentally killing any of the friendly blue ones. To do this, you have to drop the Red Aiko off the screen or plunge them into spike pits by manipulating each level the correct way, making sure to keep each blue fur ball safe. By the latter stages of the game, you’ll be playing with a variety of objects, including swings, sliders and moving cradles, in order to save your little blue buddies.

Both of Aiko Island’s developers are industry veterans with credits in big-budget games. Shaw was an animator for TT Games (Lego Star Wars) and David Deacon worked on a canceled Star Wars project at Free Radical Design. They say the challenge of creating their own game was a far different beast.

Development on Aiko Island took nine months, during which the two developers each did a little bit of everything. Deacon primarily handled programming while Shaw worked on animation, but as the only two people on the project, their roles constantly overlapped.

“That’s the really interesting side of it,” Deacon said. “Usually, you work in the industry, you have a set job. Doing Aiko Island, we found that we could mix and match different roles all the time, take on side roles and discuss lots of things.”

Even with the reduced scale of the project, it was a stressful time.

“About a month ago, we said, ‘We can’t work on it anymore,’” Deacon said. “We were working 24 hours a day…. We both became shadows of who we were.”

Despite, or perhaps because of, the workload, IceFlame is ultimately pleased with how Aiko Island turned out. And the two developers have even bigger ambitions for their next project, which Shaw calls a “massive undertaking.” They won’t say much more about it, though they plan to work together once again. Deacon and Shaw have been friends and collaborative partners for many years now, and neither expects that to change.

“Unfortunately, we can’t get rid of each other,” Shaw said.

Among the announcements when Apple released iOS 5, a couple of downloadable apps became available at the iTunes App Store. One of them, Cards (free), lets you create fold-in-the-middle greeting cards on your
iPhone, then Apple sends them on real paper via snail mail.

While other services have greeting and post cards in the past, Apple’s method is very intuitive and convenient with several designs to choose from, and the cost is about what it would be to go buy a greeting card in a store.

Start by selecting your design with several themed cards already available.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Jason Parker/CNET)

Immediately upon launch, you’re given an intuitive interface for selecting the exterior of your card. Across the bottom of the screen you can choose from icons to show cards for traveling, birthdays, holidays, and a few others, or you can select all to look at every design. There are a lot of good design choices here, but we think it could have been better with more customization options–perhaps that’s something that will come in future updates. To be fair, Apple says the reason the designs are limited is because the Cards are letterpress (debossed on a Heidelberg press), which explains some of the borders and designs that you cannot change. Once you’ve settled on a design, you can customize with your own pictures from your photo library and edit what it says on the outside of the card.

On the inside, you can edit the premade text or add a message of your own.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Jason Parker/CNET)

Across the top of the interface are buttons for Outside, Inside, and Envelope. From here you touch inside to customize the greeting. Apple has several premade greetings that are appropriate for each type of card, but you also can replace the text with your own words or make smaller tweaks to the text inside if Apple’s greeting is close to what you want. Again, you get limited options for design customization on the inside as well, so whatever borders and fonts that come with your chosen design are what you get.

Finally, you can touch the Envelope button, or touch the envelope on the screen to switch to envelope view. From here, you can fill in the recipient’s address and your return address, then send your card. The service costs $2.99 to send your card in the U.S. and $4.99 internationally.

Before purchasing, you’ll need to add your return address and the recipient’s address.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Jason Parker/CNET)

Other smart additions to Cards are helpful as well. Once a card is made the Cards app saves it to your iPhone so you can send the same card to multiple addresses (like holiday cards, for example). Also, on the day your card is delivered, you will receive a notification on your phone so you’ll know it got to the recipient.

Overall, we think Apple’s Cards is a fun and easy way to send someone a nice greeting. With a few more card styles to choose from and more design customization options for the outside and inside of the cards (specifically borders and fonts), we think this app would be worthy of a five-star rating.

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If you’re a Windows user and want to get the famously clean look of Apple’s de facto font “Lucida Grande” you can do just about as good a job with the built-in Windows font Lucida Sans. The differences between the fonts are minimal, but if you just use a straight up substitution in Photoshop, you’ll find the font is still somewhat clumsy looking compared to its Mac OS X counterpart.

With a tiny bit of tweaking, though, you can easily mimic this font using what you’ve already got on your computer. Now, I made these settings myself and they aren’t scientifically measured nor are they certified by a typographical expert. I just used my eyes and it was enough to fool me. You may be able to do better, but at least I’ve given you a starting point.

As I mentioned, the Lucida Grande font is basically equivalent to Lucida Sans or Lucida Sans Unicode. Either one will do. To get it to look like the Apple font, look at the font panel on the Photoshop sidebar. First of all, bold the text. Next, adjust its character height (“T” icon with vertical arrows) to 111% and the character spacing (“AV” icon with horizontal arrows) to -40. Finally, set the text effect to “Smooth.” That’s it! At least for me this was sufficient.

Here are the settings taken from my Photoshop install.

I achieved the effect quite simply by grabbing a screenshot of an existing example of Lucida Grande typography. Then I overlayed some text over it in Photoshop and tweaked the settings until the characters lined up exactly. You may be able to get an even closer effect through this process and I’m sure other readers (including me) would love to know how you did it. Please don’t hesitate to share in the comments!

When it comes to sharing ideas and communicating stories, sometimes it’s just easier to present your thoughts by drawing them out. Not just for Pictionary, online whiteboards are great collaborative tools to help you visualize your thoughts and brainstorm ideas. These Web apps not only throw out the smelly dry-erase markers, but also add a few tricks to make sharing your works faster and easier than ever.

A Web Whiteboard (AWW), developed by Senko Rasic, was designed to be minimalistic and simple to use like a real whiteboard. Coded in HTML5, AWW not only performs smoothly, but leaves little doubt to its functionality: users are given seven basic colors, three brush sizes, and a menu with sharing options. AWW doesn’t strive to provide all the bells and whistles of modern whiteboards in the cloud but aims to simulate the elegance of quickly jotting notes and doodles–the basic features of a physical whiteboard. Its user interface only includes three buttons, freeing users from extraneous tools or widgets. Users can collaborate with others in real time by enabling sharing in the menu and passing the URL to their friends or team members.

AWW can publish drawings to three major outlets : Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. Users can also save their images in PNG format.

If A Web Whiteboard’s strength is in its simple and approachable interface, then Twiddla flexes its muscles by offering a beefy selection of tools and extra methods of communication. Since winning awards at SXSW in 2008, the Twiddla team has been hard at work to improve performance and adding extra tools for power users. In addition to standard drawing options such as brush size and color customization, Twiddla allows you to import documents, pictures, and even Web pages directly into the canvas. Users can make markups, add shapes and text, and even mathematical formulas. Each stroke is treated as a separate object layer, making corrections and edits a breeze when compared with erasing by hand.

In addition to sharing workspaces like AWW, Twiddla also adds a textbox and VoIP capabilities so multiple users can hold audio conferences in real time. Its arsenal of tools and features make Twiddla a powerful communication medium that caters to a wide range of disciplines well beyond the average doodler. The ability to add widgets, code lines, math formulas, and document imports makes this Web app one of most functional whiteboards on the Web.

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These are instructions on how to jailbreak your iPhone 4 on the 5.0 firmware using RedSn0w for Windows. The Mac version of this tutorial is here.

This procedure will cause you to upgrade your baseband potentially ruining your chances for an unlock. Please wait until we have posted a Windows tutorial on how to update to iOS 5 using a custom ipsw if you need an unlock. The jailbreak is also tethered which means you will need to connect your device to the computer each time you reboot. Finally, it may be prudent to save your SHSH Blobs by following this tutorial before continuing.

If you want to jailbreak a lower firmware version you can find the appropriate tutorial here.

Step One
Create a folder on your desktop called Pwnage

Download RedSn0w 0.9.9b6 from here and place it in the Pwnage folder. Likewise, download the 5.0 firmware from here and place it in the Pwnage folder. (Note: you do not need to download the 5.0 firmware if you are already on iOS 5.0)

Extract the RedSn0w zip file by double clicking it.

Step Two: (You can skip this step if iOS 5 is already installed on your device)
Connect your iPhone to the computer and launch iTunes.

Select your iPhone from the list of devices on the left. Now hold down Shift and click the Restore button. Restore is preferred as it won’t create any wasted space on your iPhone.

Navigate to the Pwnage folder on your desktop and select the 5.0 firmware ipsw. Click the Choose button to continue.

iTunes will now update your iPhone to the new firmware.

Step Three
Launch the redsn0w application from the redsn0w folder we extracted earlier.

**Windows 7 users may want to try running the redsn0w executable mode as an administrator in Windows Vista compatibility. You can do this by right clicking the executable and selecting Properties from the contextual menu.

Step Four
Once RedSn0w opens click the Jailbreak button

Step Five
Plug your iPhone into the computer and make sure its OFF then click the Next button

Step Six
RedSn0w will now guide you through the steps to get into DFU mode. You can find more help with DFU mode here

Hold down both the Home button and the Power button for 10 seconds.

Release the Power button and continue holding the Home button until RedSn0w detects the device.

Step Seven
Your iPhone will now reboot

Step Eight
RedSn0w will now prepare the jailbreak data.

Step Nine
Select Cydia from the list of options and click Next.

Step Ten
Your iPhone will now be rebooted again and RedSn0w will begin uploading the new RAM Disk and Kernel.

Step Eleven
Once this is complete you will be notified that RedSn0w is done. When your iPhone finishes rebooting (5 minutes or so) it will be jailbroken with Cydia on the SpringBoard.

BOOT TETHERED
Once you have jailbroken you will need to rerun redsn0w to boot tethered.

Step One
From the main RedSn0w menu click the Extras button.

Step Two
Select Just boot from the Extras menu to just boot tethered.

*As usual a big thanks to the iPhone Dev-Team and Geohot for their hard work and contribution to the iPhone community.

A video demonstrates how the attack could be accomplished. In this screenshot, a series of blue buttons are clicked on as part of a game and the webcam is turned on.

(Credit:

Feross Aboukhadijeh)

Adobe Systems is working on a fix for a Flash-related vulnerability that could be used by Web sites to surreptitiously turn on a visitor’s microphone or Webcam.

The problem is in the Flash Player Settings Manager on Adobe’s servers and not with software on customer computers, Adobe spokeswoman Wiebke Lips told CNET today.

“Engineering is currently working on a fix,” she said in an e-mail. “Note that this issue does not involve/require a product update and/or customer action. (In other words, there will not be a security bulletin.) It’s a fix we are making on our end online, and it is going to be pushed live as soon as QA [quality assurance] has completed their testing.”

The vulnerability could be fixed by the end of the week, she said.

The problem was brought to light by Feross Aboukhadijeh, a Stanford University computer science student, in a blog post yesterday that includes a live demo. The attack uses a technique that has become popular on sites like Facebook and Twitter called “clickjacking.” Clickjacking involves hiding code in order to trick people, so that when they click on an area of the page they think they are doing something innocuous–like indicating they “like” a Facebook post, for instance–when the click actually results in something else happening, such as reposting an update.

In this case, someone could click on a series of buttons, ostensibly as part of a game, and instead have turned on the camera or microphone without knowing it.

For the attack, Aboukhadijeh hid the Flash Settings Manager SWF file behind an iFrame on the page, which let him bypass the framebusting JavaScript code, he said.

“I’ve seen a bunch of clickjacking attacks in the wild, but I’ve never seen any attacks where the attacker iframes a SWF file from a remote domain to clickjack it–let alone a .SWF file as important as one that controls access to your webcam and mic!” he wrote.

“Although every browser and OS is theoretically susceptible to this attack, the process to activate the webcam requires multiple highly targeted clicks, which is difficult for an attacker to pull off,” he notes. “I’m not sure how useful this technique would actually be in the wild, but I hope that Adobe fixes it soon so we don’t have to find out.”

A similar problem arose in 2008, but that issue required Adobe to update its Flash Player software on customer computers to fix, Lips said.

Aboukhadijeh said he reported the problem to Adobe a few weeks ago. But his e-mail was sent to an employee who was on sabbatical and not to the Adobe Product Security Incident Response Team, so Adobe didn’t know about the issue until his blog post came out, according to Lips.

“Adobe has to get on this one QUICK,” said Jeremiah Grossman, chief technology officer at Whitehat Security, who has been warning about the dangers of clickjacking for several years. “Everyone should make sure they have the Post-IT note defense fully deployed,” he wrote in an e-mail, referring to the technique of covering the Web camera lens with a scrap of paper.

Updated Thursday, October 20, 2011, at 3:00 p.m.: Adobe says that it has fixed the problem with a change to the Flash Player Settings Manager SWF file hosted on the Adobe Web site. Users will not have to download an update to their Flash Player.

CNET’s Seth Rosenblatt contributed to this report.