The red terror goes Val Doonican

By all acounts this christmas the hot property is going to be Elmo Live, the latest incarnation of Sesame street’s possibly demonic chld hypnotizer. There’s a mildly shonky, but useful video review over on Robots Rule (http://www.robotsrule.com/html/elmo-live.php).

Personally this actually looks less fun than the far less ‘intelligent’ tickle me Elmo which, although limited in function, had a ludicrously high ‘Again! Again’ factor. The fact that the new scarlet scallywag can tell he has fallen over is, I presume, purely becuase it’s something he’ll be doing a lot without his chair. If I remember correctly being a child (and I struggle with remembering last week so I may be a bit off) toys like that shouldn’t have a specific prop in order to function, it limits the room for exploration and imagination.

What’s really floating my boat, and burning a hole in a pocket that’s already been widened by a secondhand Robosapien V2 is Ugobe Lifeform’s Pleo (http://www.pleoworld.com/) which takes the usual limitations of consumer robotics (speed and stupidity) and makes them features of it’s adorable anthropomorphic baby Camarasaurus. They’ve also followed the lead of WowWee, who realising that the big kids would want to play with their toys in a much more adult way, with the release of SDK’s and machanical hacking information.

It’s a trand that I appreciate along with every other hacker in the world. If you know poeple are going to hack your kit then help them, we’ll evangelise your product all the more for it.