If your wallet serves as more of a toolbox than a place to stash a few bucks, alongside a flat-pack knife and credit card-sized multi-tools, you can also slip in this super tiny, 3D-printed chess set. Compared to playing rock-paper-scissors, it’s a far more civilized way to make important decisions.
Welcome back to Toy Aisle, io9's weekly roundup of shiny toys and merch we desperately wish we had the money to waste on. This week is getting a bit life-sized, with a giant Star Wars trooper, a slightly less giant (but still life-sized) baby Groot, and a cool look at Thor’s new Infinity War weapon. Check it out!
The original Game Boy was the first device to push my fascination with gadgets to an obsession. I saved for months to buy one, and to this day it’s still one of my favorite gaming platforms. That explains why, despite every gadget I use having an alarm clock built-in, I now prefer waking up to this adorable Game Boy…
A Bluetooth-connected foam ball packed with sensors and a battery you need to charge sounds like one of Silicon Valley’s worst ideas. Haven’t balls been adequately entertaining kids for centuries already? But it only took one toss of Play Impossible’s Gameball for me to understand why a ball upgraded with…
After decades of being confined to little plastic eggs (and the occasional, usually Japan-only video game), nostalgia-rich pet simulators Tamagotchi are finally coming to people’s phones, where we can all fuck up raising them at our own convenience.
Welcome back to Toy Aisle, which after a post-Toy Fair break, is back and ready to tempt your wallet with all sorts of lavish toys and collectibles. This week, we’ve got a very special Lego minifigure, almost comically deadly darts, and a Jabba worthy of any great Hutt’s display cabinet. Come take a look!
You can complain about The Phantom Menace all you want, but the podrace scene remains one of the best visual spectacles in all the Star Wars movies. It spawned some wonderful toys too, but nothing that comes close to Alexis Dos Santos’ Lego Mindstorms-powered tabletop pod racing game.
It’s all but impossible to reach the end of the Harry Potter books or movies without secretly pining for a wand of your own, but it’s probably best for humanity that we’re not all flailing magical sticks around. The next best thing would be JAKKS Pacific’s new interactive Wizard Training Wands that make it feel like…
Oh Miitomo, it seems like it was just yesterday when you arrived on phones as Nintendo’s first mobile app, bringing a tiny bit of that Mario joy and magic to the small screen. But after less than three years on the market, Nintendo is killing off the Miitomo app in just a few months on May 9th.
While you may mess up a critical plot point of an epic franchise, you can pick up this droid littleBits set and make your own R2 unit the way you want. These sets are basically like if LEGO and K’nex had a baby and added a battery. A bunch of you bought these around the holidays, but today’s price is within $2 of the…
Harry Potter has always had a weird relationship with video games, from the traditional movie tie-ins to the Lego series. But now that the franchise has mostly stepped aside for the prequel era in Fantastic Beasts, you’d think we’d start seeing more games connected to Newt instead of Harry and friends—but the latest …
The first look at the Tomb Raider reboot gave us plenty of tomb-raiding action, with a lot of it inspired by the 2013 video game reboot of Lara Croft’s escapades. The latest trailer shows us a lot of what’s been added to the film beyond the inspiration of the game series—and it’s pretty much all about the legacy of…
Authorities have charged 25-year-old Los Angeles man Tyler Barriss with manslaughter for allegedly placing a hoax call that led to a Wichita, Kansas police officer shooting and killing an innocent man, the L.A. Times reported.
HQ Trivia, the alarmingly popular trivia app which increasingly threatens to take over our reality, has been iOS-only since its mid-October launch. The result has been that 12 times a week, iPhone owners have been swarmed by everyone else trying to get a slice of that sweet, addictive trivia.
Despite Nintendo promising to bring back the NES Classic Edition next year, and to manufacture enough SNES Classic Editions to meet demand, both consoles are still hard to come by ahead of the looming Christmas deadline. ThinkGeek has managed to get its hands on a bunch of both consoles, but the retailer says it will…
Before the Switch, before the 3DS, and even before the Game Boy, Nintendo had the Game & Watch: a series of handheld video games that were primitive by today’s standards, but mind-blowing to ‘80s kids. And they made such an impression on computer scientist Thomas Tilley that he recently created a gigantic version of…
Still having a hard time finding a Nintendo Switch? The hunt’s only going to get harder now that the holidays are here, but why add to your pre-Christmas stresses when you can just build your own playable version of Super Mario out of cardboard, and save yourself hundreds of dollars?
Cards Against Humanity, the nerd-beloved party game which asks players to respond to a variety of Mad Lib-style prompts with extremely offensive words and phrases, is famous for promotions like selling unsuspecting fans boxes of literal shit. This year, it’s upping the ante (and paying for goodwill with well-meaning…
When you think about the early days of virtual reality, you either think of the movie The Lawnmower Man, or that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where the crew gets addicted to an augmented reality game that almost kills everyone. Which, by the way, you can now play on Microsoft’s HoloLens AR headset.
While Reddit sometimes overstates its value as a space for authentic conversations online, the massive community-driven website has served as a kind of town hall where everyone from everyone from Elon Musk and Barack Obama to a dildo manufacturer have responded to questions from completely un-vetted strangers.…
