Wicki! Wicki! DJ Optical Mouse Fun

Over at the recently relaunched Playthrough blog, they've posted up a link to the awesome (but sadly not playable online) turntable-controlled Flash game 'Wicki Wicki', as co-created by Swedish design student Patrik Berg.

As Playthrough notes: "24 year old student of design, Patrik Berg created a brilliant prototype for a musical video game named Wicki! Wicki! where the player ’scratches’ along to various electronica and hip-hop tracks using a special turntable peripheral."

It continues: "To create the peripheral, Berg merely refinished an old Technics turntable, mounting an optical mouse as a pickup, which was then hacked to be controlled by a PC running a Flash game developed by Berg and his school team. So far only used in a school competition, this is definitely a fun little game for those budding DJs out there who are tired of scratching up their record collections."

Reminds a bit of Sega's Crackin' DJ, which actually used a turntable properly, unlike the still-fun Beatmania - though I guess this probably doesn't measure the length of the scratch, so it's more like Beatmania in that sense? Brain... cloudy!