Gadget Guru’s magic box

Sony, Sony, Sony. Old Dave Sony has let GaGu down and basically ruined Christmas, because his PlayStation Classic is, it turns out, packed with a load of old guff that nobody really wants to play. Certainly, back in the day, Guru got his chuckles out of the likes of Twisted Metal and Destruction Derby but these jagged polygon messes don’t stand up in this day and age. Similarly disappointing, the latest attempt to milk the Neo Geo library for all it’s worth. The off-colour arcade machineshaped NeoGeo Mini (£129, snk-corp.co.jp) has an odd controller, a price that’s about twice as high as it ought to be, quite terrible TV output, and its external pads are just about the worst bit of hardware engineering Guru’s ever seen. At least the screen is the right resolution for the games.

So, what’s been going on on Kickstarter? Simone Giertz (she of the deliberately, hilariously rubbish robots) has funded the $300 Every Day Calendar, a motivational progress tracker which lights up day-by-day. Not technologically exciting, but it’s damn stylish, and could be just the thing GaGu needs to replace a big cream cake as a reward for getting up each day.

Also, big news out of the KS office is that they’ve dumped the Patreon-aping Drip service, presumably causing the few people still using it to leap straight to its competitor. But they’re not done – apparently there’s a new person-funding initiative in the works, and it’s being put together by the ultranerds behind the XOXO festival, so it ought to represent what the internet community is actually after. Whether it’ll gain the sort of traction that Drip didn’t is another matter.