Time for another random general interest post, mixing in small pieces of news that probably aren’t worth a whole post to themselves.
Amusement Expo is just a week away. Unfortunately as things have worked out for me, I can’t make it this year, too many bills to juggle between moving the arcade and the personal life. It sucks as this time there are at least two brand new big name games coming along I would like to get some hands-on time with but I will have to wait. However, I still will get coverage from the show as best I can to share with all of you.
Random bits o’ news:
Real Steel Comes to Arcades as a Videmption Game
I received the March issue of Replay Magazine in my mailbox the other day and there was a little surprise on the cover, revealing that Play Mechanix has developed an arcade version for the movie Real Steel for ICE. They have made a number of videmption games for ICE already, including Buster Bubble, Deal or No Deal, and Ice Age: Ice Breaker among others. According to the article the game works like this: “Players pull back the giant fist and then attempt to time the release of the fist to knock out the opposing robots.” Knock out a robot and move to the next round until you face Zeus. It sounds pretty straight forward, almost like a simple version of Punch-Out. If you were going to do a new arcade Punch-Out, this seems like a proper way to go about it.
Sinistar: The Vacuum Cleaner
It’s been a while but our old friend Sinistar is back, and continuing his descent from a full-time fearsome spaceship cruncher, now he’s relegated to cleaning floors. In case you missed it, his last job was being a cake.
This was done by Tursi, a computer programmer who created Cool Herders for the Sega Dreamcast and Nintendo DS. He also does a lot of work on the Texas Instruments 99/4A, which was the first game console/PC hybrid I owned (and still have)
Konami’s Fox Engine Is Pretty Awesome
This isn’t something that is just for arcades but computing in general as a graphics engine. The Fox Engine in particular uses a lighting technique called Global Illumination, which deals with how light bounces off surfaces to illuminate others. The technique isn’t exclusive to the Fox engine by any means so it could be used by arcade games which these days typically run off mid-range PC hardware anyways, creating graphics that stand out and will stop players in their tracks to gawk at the game.
No this isn’t the first interview with Mr. Alcorn who was a principal figure at Atari from the get-go, and it certainly won’t be the last with this being the 40th Anniversary of Atari. This interview does touch a little more on the home version of Pong than the arcade, although there is still arcade talk there.
Speaking of that, if any Atari employees are out there that read the blog, please drop me a line. I would be very happy to collect and share your thoughts on your experience with Atari on this 40th anniversary year, no matter what phase of the company you worked for.
I almost forgot about this one, via Facebook post by site reader Kieran May. Pac-Man is coming back to TV late 2013. I pretty much missed out on Pac-Man on TV back in the 80s for whatever reason (I was more concerned with Voltron, Transformers and Ghostbusters at the time), and not too many arcade characters get public attention like Pac-Man does. Maybe they will do a Battle Royale episode 😛
I think the original pacman series by hanna barbera airs sometimes on Boomerang every so often in the US that is but there are episodes uploaded on youtube