For today’s newsbag, let’s start with a follow-up to the last one posted a few days ago, particularly the story about the RiftCycles VR project. This project being created by “Arcade Man” is setting about creating a TRON Legacy inspired light-cycle game that fuses an arcade-style bike that you sit on and the Oculus Rift VR hardware (although I’m not sure if we’re supposed to call that the Facebook Oculus Rift, or Facebook Rift headset now) for a first-person TRON light-cycle experience. ArcadeMan has now uploaded a video to Youtube showing this prototype in action:
Stern Pinball has launched a new website with a different theme and new functionality. It has a stronger focus on artwork that you might see on pinball machines. It’s easier to browse than before and they now make it easy to find a distributor to buy your game from; overall I think it is a good change.
Also in pinball news that spread around the internet yesterday, game designer and artist Python Anhgelo has passed away after a battle with cancer. He worked on quite a few pinball machines in the late 80s/early 90s, including High Speed, Fish Tales, Popeye Saves The Earth and the two Pinbot machines, among several others. Pinballnews has a write-up on his history and passion for pinball here. Here’s a fireside chat he did while attending a pinball event last year:
Finally from the DNA Association is a link that mentions the opening of a new “race center” in Saudi Arabia, the first of its kind which focuses on simulator racing games. Although I would think that the Ferrari theme park in Dubai might have stolen that thunder first. It would be interesting to know how well these kinds of venues that focus almost exclusively on large expensive simulators do in the long run as you usually hear about them opening but not how they handle things after the dust settles from the grand opening. This week was the DEAL tradeshow which happens annually in Dubai although I haven’t heard any news from the event hitting the wires.
