The original must-have gaming system is back on the market with the Nintendo Entertainment System: NES Classic Edition. At a glance, it looks just like its predecessor, but clearly much smaller as it fits in the palm of your hand.

The device connects to your TV and comes with a controller also like the original, though it additional connects to the Wii. No cartridges needed for this bad boy, which comes prepacked with dozens of games.

Bonus round: game-specific passwords are not a problem and you can stop at any point along the way, picking up where you left off with ease. Meanwhile, the games are as follows – basically, all the classics:

Balloon Fight
Bubble Bobble
Castlevania
Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest
Donkey Kong
Donkey Kong Jr.
Double Dragon II: The Revenge
Dr. Mario
Excitebike
Final Fantasy
Galaga
Ghosts’N Goblins
Gradius
Ice Climber
Kid Icarus
Kirby’s Adventure
Mario Bros.
Mega Man 2
Metroid
Ninja Gaiden
Pac-Man
Punch-Out!! Featuring Mr. Dream
StarTropics
Super C
Super Mario Bros.
Super Mario Bros. 2
Super Mario Bros. 3
Tecmo Bowl
The Legend of Zelda
Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

The post NES Mini: Classic Nintendo Back with 30 Games for Just $60 first appeared on Gajitz.

Trying to get young kids to eat is like trying to put makeup on a cat – if it doesn’t want it, it’s not happening. The Argentinean arm of mega-creative group Wunderman has come up with a way to make mealtimes for fun for little kids in the hopes that it will encourage better nutrition and a healthy relationship with food.

Yumit is a high-tech interactive meal set that tracks every last bite your kid eats (or doesn’t eat). The main piece of the set is a placemat that doubles as a digital scale. When you put a meal in front of your child, the scale registers the exact weight and uses that as a starting point to gauge how much Junior eats.

Every bite he takes translates into a sort of currency or energy to use in games across a variety of platforms. The more your mini-you eats, the more energy he saves up for his next session of screen time. The idea is that the promise of future fun will help kids focus on eating when it’s time to eat, instead of taking an hour and a half to eat three grapes and a square of cheese (we’ve been there).

The hardware itself is colorful and kid-friendly. The placemat/scale is covered in a washable, heat-resistant silicone. A small strip of multicolored LEDs under the surface keep kids visually engaged during mealtime. The melamine plate and silicone-coated silverware are resistant to all kinds of havoc little hands can wreak on kitchen stuff. The video games that go along with the system haven’t been developed yet, but eventually Yumit will be open to developers.

As parents, we have a few concerns about the idea of encouraging eating with the promise of video games. When we were little, our incentive to eat was the threat going hungry the rest of the day or – even worse – getting a punishment from mom. Will incentivizing and rewarding simple, completely necessary actions lead to a generation of kids who feel entitled to reward for everything they do? Maybe, but when you’re completely desperate to get your toddler to eat something – ANYTHING – even that risk seems low in relation to the possible benefits.

The post Play With Your Food: Gamified Meal Set Makes Eating Fun first appeared on Gajitz.

If you’re old enough to remember wasting days at a time playing the original Super Mario Bros., you’re probably old enough to remember a time when video games didn’t have the option to get you up and moving around in front of a camera to play. Trammell Hudson of NYC Resistor remade the classic platform game into one that you actually have to move to play.

It isn’t really a remake of the game, per se; just the way it’s played. Mario and friends are lit up on a gigantic cylindrical screen and the game is played as normal – only instead of sitting on your butt and waggling your arms from time to time, you actually have to walk or jog around the cylinder so you can see what you’re doing. According to Hudson in an interview with Popular Science (above), the game only runs the first level and it takes about 12 laps around the screen to complete the level.

The cylinder is called MegaScroller. Hudson created it for the NYC Resistor 2014 Interactive Show. The huge screen can be used for displaying art pieces, but it also has an interactive mode which allows viewers to play video games. MegaScroller won two editor’s choice awards and a best in class award at 2014 NYC MakerFaire. Hudson has made the sources available on his website for those brave enough to construct their very own MegaScroller.

The post Giant Cylindrical Screen Makes You Run to Play Video Game first appeared on Gajitz.

One of the best parts of summer is water balloon fights. One of the worst parts of summer is preparing for water balloon fights. An hour just to fill up a tiny stockpile of balloons that’ll just be decimated in two minutes anyway? No, thank you. We usually just go all crazy and start spraying the other team with the garden hose, but super-smart dude Josh Malone has a better idea.

Malone is a father of eight, so he’s probably seen more than his share of water balloon fights. He came up with an ingenious contraption called Bunch O Balloons that lets you fill up 37 water balloons in about 20 seconds. And the best part is that you don’t even have to tie the balloons, which is easily the most frustrating part of the whole water balloon process.

Bunch O Balloons is a one-use device that you just screw right onto the nozzle of your garden hose. Turn the hose on, let the balloons fill up for about 20 seconds, and then just jiggle the hose over a container full of water to safely release the filled balloons. Repeat a few times and you can fill up 100 water balloons in one minute. That other team won’t stand a chance.

The crazy invention is raising funds on Kickstarter and has already raised way more than its modest $10,000 goal. Pledges of $15 or more get one package of Bunch O Balloons, enough to fill 100 balloons. We seriously can’t wait to start the neighborhood’s biggest water balloon fight and totally dominate all those suckers still filling up one balloon at a time.

The post Evil Genius Dad Invents Super-Rapid Water Balloon Filler first appeared on Gajitz.

We don’t know about you, but we lose our iPhones on the regular. They’re usually found in stupid places like between the couch cushions or in a jacket pocket. Activating the “Find my iPhone” feature to locate your smartphone is definitely helpful, but no fun. The $1 Marco Polo app lets you find a lost phone in a far more fun way: by shouting “Marco” and waiting for your phone to answer with “Polo!” Even if your phone is on silent or in sleep mode, the app will guide you to it just like the classic swimming pool game…except your phone won’t try to cheat by hiding on the other side of the deep end rope.

According to a review at TUAW, the app works up to a couple of rooms away, with varying success based on ambient noise and physical barriers. If you know your phone is in your house but aren’t sure where, you can walk around shouting “Marco” and listening for the phone to respond. Although the phone will always say “Polo” in response, you can customize your end of the communication by setting a different activation word. You can customize the voice, though, and you can also set the app to respond at full volume even if your iPhone’s volume setting is at the lowest level. Of course, if you really can’t find your phone and your game of “Appleseed Polo” isn’t helping, you can still turn to Find My iPhone to, well, find your iPhone.

The post Find Your Lost iPhone by Playing a Game of Marco Polo first appeared on Gajitz.