Catching up on the past couple of weeks

While I have been away, plenty has been going on in the arcade world and fortunately Kevin Williams of The Stinger Report has kept sending us the newsfeeds with links to related arcade stuff. While we normally take the time to comment on each item individually, covering a couple weeks worth of content in one post doesn’t allow for that so I will just post the link with a small comment instead(I am remembering how much dial-up sucks right now, and why it should be hated with the passion of a 1000 burning stars). Things will be back to normal here next week though.

Again, all links sent to us by The Stinger Report. I haven’t had a chance to check my other e-mails at the moment but if there is anything there that you the readers have sent out, I will try to get to those as soon as I can.

Atari Arcade Pint Glasses 4-pack(ThinkGeek) – Seems to me like we covered this not too long ago.

Virtual America Army Experience – I know we covered this too so I’m not sure why it was in the feed again.

Pac-Man Creator reflects back on 30 years of Pac-Man (Wired.com) – May 22nd was the 30th anniversary from when Pac-Man showed up on it’s first location test. This was a good interview with the Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani (who has since retired), who offers fascinating insight into the craze he created.

New generation of instant-win games and their popularity (Citizen.com) – An article looking into why instant redemption games like Stacker, Winners Circle and others are so popular. The article spends a bit of time going on about why most US arcades feature more redemption than video, why video is on the decline since the 80’s and that sort of thing we tend to see in articles like this.

Update on what’s going on with the corpse of Midway games (Businessweek.com) – self-explanatory.

Tekken 7 in the works (Neo-arcadia.com) – I have a hunch that this was all over the internet when it came out. As long as Namco gives the arcade version a nice period of exclusivity as they did with TK6 but with a lower price point (the high price was a major reason why Namco America didn’t spend resources on pushing the game in the US) then it will be a great contender amongst the many other fighters popping up out there.

Gunblade on the Wii (Go Nintendo) – I had heard about this before I left but did’t get around to mentioning it

Virtual Sports Simulators launches a new game called Virtual Sports Stadium – The Virtual Sports website doesn’t have this up as far as I can tell so here’s what I have from what Kevin sent: “The “Stadium” plays just like our traditional multi-sport simulators, with one key difference. Instead of using a screen, it uses a net. Traditional simulators have the player throw an object at a large screen with a projected image displayed on it. With the “Stadium” you are throwing and kicking balls at a net with the image being displayed on a large television. This eliminates the need for a projector. With the projector removed we are able to provide a full simulator experience in a fraction of the space needed for traditional simulators.”

Pacific Pinball Museum Open (Waxing Erratic)- This isn’t a Stinger Link, but it’s still worthy of being mentioned

The Nintendo Game Boy Arcade mod (GadgetVenue) – This is pretty cool, even though when it comes to classic portables the Atari Lynx had the best conversions. Admittedly, the Lynx wasn’t built for an arcade case mod.

There is actually a little more but it took me over two hours to compile the above thanks to the slow connection and I have to run at the moment. Perhaps I’ll get a chance to get to the rest tomorrow, we’ll see.