Out on 27th Nov, new Nintendo DSi game Hair Salon from 505 will let you be a virtual hairdresser -and cut your friends' hair on screen.

Capable of incorporating photos of you and your friends, the game uses the DSi's facial recognition to get exactly the right size and angle of shot. You can then use yourself or your friends as models or customers.

Time to give your little sister the pink up-do you always thought she would suit.

Ooo, Take That comes to the Singstar catalogue tomorrow. Fans around the world can now sing / howl tunelessly to the boy band's energetic pop tunes and soulful ballads. The latest addition to the Singing game's catalogue includes 25 of the classics and a few more off-beat hits.

The dreams of gamers are providing useful insight into the purpose of dreams.

Apparently gamers who dream about playing video games perform better than those who don't. A study by Harvard Medical School doesn't definitely prove the correlation, but the studies strongly suggest that dreaming and learning are intertwined.

Nintendo will sell a limited number of black Wiis in the UK and Ireland next month, from November 6.

It's an entirely superficial change, but it may get the Wii fans out lusting for the new colour, especially as the Christmas buying season starts. The black Wii hits mainland Europe two weeks later on November 20.

No, Nintendo haven't invented dog tennis - but they have invented a way to let you to hook little Fido up to the Wii Fit. He doesn't actually get to play games, or even do any dog specific exercises, but you can weigh him and see how his diet is doing.

The key feature of the original Wii Fit game is the plastic Wii Balance board, which doubles up as a game controller, calorie burn counter, and now in the new Wii Fit Plus game it also serves as a weighing machine for your pet.

You can also create a Mii avatar for your dog. I think that's something we've all wanted to do for a while.

At last - the geography geek comes into her own!

A new iPhone game ask you to place the cities of the world on a map - and the more accurately and quicker you can do it, the better you do. The game, Geomaster costing £1.19 from Visuamobile is also available on the iPod Touch. Finally those youthful hours spent poring over atlases will be useful.

Played over time, of course this would actually teach you about the world's geography as well. Where is Addis Ababa for example. There's a US cities challenge as well as the worldwide one and more challenges planned: a US state game, countries of Asia, Europe, South America... and a lot more.

Perhaps this should be made compulsory for those people they always interview in documentaries who think Afghanistan is in France etc.
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Related: Super Obama World: The best virtual Obama gameage yet

If there's anything that would improve your living room surely it's some large pieces of green plastic from the games accessories manufacturer Thrustmaster.

Though they may look like pieces of a nu-rave S&M bondage kit, these are muscle and fitness enhancing accessories which can combine with your Ninentdo Wii. As the days get chillier, exercising outside gets less appealing and staying in the sitting room with your Wii becomes a more pleasant option... so Thrustmaster has designed their products to maximise the exercise benefits you get from a Wii game.

There are weighted wrist and ankle bands, devices which make you burn that much more energy when you move those particular parts of your body, and a step aerobic riser that makes stepping up and down that much more strenuous.

Follow on after the jump

For those Hello Kitty fangirls out there, there's a new cute cat in town, Angel Cat Sugar. From the creator of the world's most famous cat, Yuko Shimizu, she is the star of a new computer game, coming out the 1st October.

Combing three lovely things in her name, she has angel wings and spreads love and happiness through her kindness to others. She's been around since 2002, but is only hitting the games market now. Angel Cat and her best friends Basil, Parsley and Thyme all feature.

The game, on Nintendo DS, brings Angel Cat Sugar to life as it takes players into "the magical Angel World, where they too can help make the world a better place through kindness".

See the story of the game after the jump

Sims 3 is a bit of a marvel, and its new neighbourhood feature makes social interaction a lot easier and more realistic.

In a brilliant blog, games design student Robin Burkinshaw tells the tragic but fascinating story of what happened when she stripped two characters of their possessions and left them in a place designed to look an abandoned park, letting her simulated humans fend for themselves.

It's a virtual social experiment that relies almost entirely on the programming of the characters to decide what happens next.

Like some kind of David Attenborough of the Sims world, her reportage of how they try to keep surviving is slow, clear and keeps you begging for more. It is testament to How Amazing Sims 3 is that - minus a few thought bubbles here and there - this could be a true story IRL, and it's gaining a big following.

Read more after the jump:

E3 excitement has most gamers rubbing their hands in a frenzy of anticipation and trying to wonder what they can pawn/steal to afford some of the releases soon heading to our shores. Burt amongst the many, many great game son offer, are some whose quality is slightly more questionable. Here's our round up of the games you SHOULDN'T get this year...

CLICK THE IMAGE BELOW TO START THE GALLERY

Rumours have abounded for some time now in regards to the hotly aanticipated PSP announcement, and some have described the launch of the new handheld device as 'the worst-kept secret of E3'. We now have confirmation on the new device, but will it live up to stylish mock up pic (above) that we coveted?

We said: No more UMD Discs

We got: No UMD discs! Instead the device will have a 16GB flash memory, so there's no need for that pesky drive! They've also added in Bluetooth support so you can potentially 'share' games.

The battle for the console crown is full steam ahead, as Sony reveals its new 'Wii-like' controller for the PS3, which seems to directly rival Microsoft's Project Natal. This woks by using a Playstation Eye camera to connect with the newly designed remote, which vaguely resembles a magic wand, with a flashing pink orb at the top.

Gaming with no controllers? Sounds like the kind of thing dreamed up by people who spent to much time watching the Fifth Element. Nonetheless, this exciting proposition is to become a reality- and it's going to be a lot more intuitive and involved than the ill fated Eyetoy.

What you're looking at is a system which allow your body to be the gamepad- as your various wiggles, kicks and actions will be decoded by the system and interpreted into game action. Essentially the aim is to allow you to become a giant Wiimote- but how do they plan to do this?

It's all to do with the Project Natal sensor, a device which combines an RGB camera, depth sensor, mic and processor in one. Simply stand in front of the camera and your movements will be tracked and translated- in 3D! The issue with previous incarnations of this type (the Eyetoy again) were that they viewed the body in 2D which led to slow reaction times and jerky gameplay.

The heat is on for DJ style games, and it seems DJ Hero from Activision has some competition on its hands, with the scarily similar looking Scratch Deck. The game is called Scratch: The Ultimate DJ.Wouldn't you know it- it also features a peripheral set of decks to allow you to score points on a turntable-style highway.

It's one of those curses of modern day living- batteries will die at the most inopportune times, and then your spare set/charger is nowhere to be found. Well it seems gamers aren't going to sit back and let their rating levels drop due to juiced out equipment, and a novel idea to keep the Wii working has been introduced.

Say hello to the Wiimote inductive charging system, which needs no batteries or plug sockets to keep your controller in power.

Ah Carol, mistress of so many things, from strange detox diets to complicated calibrations of the Countdown kind. She's using her many talents to support Britons getting fit, by teaming up with Nintendo to launch Active Health on the DS.

The game follows in the same vein as the soon to be released EA Active and already popular My Health Coach by allowing players an easy way to monitor their calorific intake, work out their BMI and get a tailored exercise plan.