Author Archives: MaxShrek

Some guy named Devo made himself some scrap metal Transformers. Here’s a link to his tumblr blog, he’s done some awesome work over there. But it looks like for some reason he thinks “welding goggles are overrated…” (!) Some day, he’ll be asking his friends “Do you see that big, blue glowing ball in front of us?”

Via Yahoo!News.

EXCERPT:  The web site of game developer Ubisoft Entertainment SA says the title is due for release this summer. Screen shots from the game show three characters armed with a pistol, an assault rifle and a shotgun ready to open fire on a city street.

Ricardo Boone Salmon, a congressman for Chihuahua state, where Ciudad Juarez is located, said the state legislature unanimously approved a request this week asking the federal Interior Department to ban the game.”  It is true there is a serious crime situation, which we are not trying to hide,” Boone Salmon said. “But we also should not expose children to this kind of scenarios so that they are going to grow up with this kind of image and lack of values.”

Via Me:

Sure, it’s in bad taste, but lots of things are: the Pearl Harbor attack in the original Blazing Angels, the black dude in Final Fantasy VII, cartoons of Mohammed, and West Texas crude.  I think kids have been desensitized to the point of not caring, but I also think society as a whole does understand the difference between real and fake violence.  I have sympathy for the fox, but I also have sympathy for the hound in the hunt. Sue me, you’ll get nothing.

Life imitating art imitating life-like art and lifing imitations of imita.. Screw it, Billy Mitchell loves himself something fierce:

Cool to resurrect a dying idea, the Arcade. Now shave the damned beard!

Admit it, you’ve hummed this song too many times. Now, somebody has one-upped you:

Looks like something out of the good old Enterprise NCC 170, sounds like, umm.. something else!

Duke Nukem fans are indeed a dedicated bunch. Fate of Humanity was created by Duke fans, and it’s actually pretty slick, as found on a link at the always reliable Kotaku. The riff will grate on you after a minute or so, but eh, it’s Duke!

There are tons of hacks going on with the XBox 360 Kinect peripheral, and, yes, somebody ‘s gone and made it sexy. Sure, some games make some pervs think how to “play one-handed”, but this one allows you to play with your hands. Nice, I guess, no chance of virtual cold sores or chlamydia. but where’s the virtual box of tissues?

Joystiq's ThriXXX image

Games rarely imitate life properly, which is probably a good thing. Nobody wants to run around eating pills and eating specters, or getting blown into bits only to re-spawn and have it happen again. The Wolfenstein series throws you into the role of Nazi killing, and a mod that should be coming out soon takes the extreme creative license of Wolfenstein, and throws in a little history with the uprising in Auschwitz in 1944.

The game will include crematoria, gas chambers, whatever was there, represented in glorious pixels. I enjoy killing Nazis in games just as much as the next person, but when you put in the images of concentration camp prisoners, living and dead, to the laymen it would seem as a cheap way to get exposure. To many in the gaming community, they could probably appreciate it for what it is, then forget about it the next week.

I love andriasang.com, it keeps me aware of strange Japanese RPGs, shmups, fetish games, and other stuff that wouldn’t fly in the States, or could with police protection (and not within 300ft/100m from a school.)  But I gotta admit, this is weird, even for Japan: a scale model of one of those odd robot samurai, I guess similar to Tranzor Z or Mazon X.

On top of this, Sega is celebrating the 15th anniversary of Virtual On and the XBox 360  version of Virtual On Force with a giant poster on the side of their GiGO amusement center in Akihabara.  It seems a bit ostentatious, but why not, I asked myself. (I didn’t answer).

Saw this at Makezine while searching for pinball images. Superman pinball, bad. Futurama pinball… awesome. Not to mention, the Metallica pinball built from an old Earthshaker! pinball from Metalinjection.

Living here in the Hudson Valley in the sometimes aesthetically challenged state of New York can sometimes send you back into time. The infrastructure of the “world’s greatest city” is built around roads designed for a Model T, Long Island was designed in a strange way by Mr. Robert Moses to promote the odd American term “White Flight”, and the rest of New York state north of “The City” has an odd desire to separate from The City. There’s really nothing much at first glance of what many people call
Upstate New York.

But every now and then, in nooks, crannies, and other odd locations, you find some cool stuff. In Beacon, NY, (60 miles/ 97 km north of The City), we had The Retro Arcade Museum. Forget your super Naomi boards and video light gun games.  This place was a wired-for-solenoid arcade museum, the hum and smell of electricity in the air, with old pinball machines, mechanical light-gun games, mini slot-car racer ninja gun games, all rendered in 3D Real. 3D Real isn’t some fancy new game engine, it’s actual physical cut-outs, wooden and plastic ninjas, helicopters, slo-tcars, etc. Awesome stuff that you might see in an old movie set in the 1970s or earlier.

The reason I mention the Retro Arcade Museum, is the City of Beacon and its laws. Seems they didn’t like the riff-raff that frequented pinball halls or arcades, so they passed laws preventing gaming on Main Street. The law was passed way back in  post-World War II-era crazy New York. We’re talking 1940-something or 1950-whatever. The museum was open for awhile, but somebody who didn’t like the noise in the neighborhood found the law, brought it to the attention of the city, and the museum was shut down. Funny, how it’s near a bank, a bar, and a place that has live music, in a city that is constantly trying to revitalize itself. But it seems now that the museum is no more.