Newsbag: Charity Arcade; Sega+Legos; WrestleMania LE; TRON 3; NTG#39

♪ It’s weekend time again, do do doooo ♪ This has been a really slow March for news I’m not 100% sure why that is but I will be making efforts to see if I can find more than two stories to discuss during the coming week. Also, Amusement Expo will be here in less than two weeks now so that will mean new videos! Speaking of new, FlyerFever has updated with some flyers I have not seen before:

Charity Arcades At the Stockholm Airport – I had seen the picture floating around social media but while doing some Youtube searching I came across this video showing where the cabinets were located. It’s a pretty neat idea to get donations, just as long as it goes to those in need and not to “administrative costs”.

Sega Legos Arcade Set – I played with Legos before they went virtual and were called Minecraft (I kid, I kid) and it is too bad this idea wasn’t brought to life back in the 80s but better late than never. This page on Ideas.Legos.com is seeking to gather support to produce a set of Sega Arcade Cabinets (Space Harrier, OutRun and ThunderBlade) along with Lego characters including “Sega Fan (Male)”, “Sega Fan (Female)” and Sega’s famous game designer, Yu Suzuki. It would be great to see this come to life as it could lead to others but they need more supporters to jump on board to make it potentially happen – 10,000 total and present it is a few hundred shy of 2000. Fortunately there is more than enough time for that goal to be reached given there are 356 days left. Speaking of that, here is another arcade project found on the website, so far it has fewer supporters and less time to support it. Why not support both? 😉

WrestleMania Pinball LE – Limited Edition models of Stern’s newest pinball machine are finding their way out into the wild and thanks to that, video. Marking the first use of a color LCD in one of their games is significant, where it appears to just offer WWE footage and not alert the player to anything (which is still handled by the red monochrome screen above). Jump ahead to the 1:00 mark to check it out:

CRT Vs LCD – It has been quite a while since we had that discussion but since 2008, monitor tech has certainly found improvements and changes. Here is a new blog post over at Isocube(link fixed) where the subject is being tackled again. I know most collectors are still firmly in the camp of maintaining CRTs but I have switched to LCD on a few of my games and I haven’t heard any complaints (or seen a difference in earnings). I know it is going to depend on the person and of course I think if you can do CRT then that is the best thing to stick to but there are instances where LCD is going to be much easier to deal with.

As one example, I had a Neotec monitor in a Mars Matrix that when it broke, no one wanted to touch it because they are outside of the much more comfortable territory of Wells-Gardner. I checked with techs all over and could not find one that would even look at it.  I could have stuck with having a dead cabinet until I grabbed another tube and chassis or gone with the less headache inducing route of getting a converter board and making the switch. My Ms. Pac-Man monitor fried this week (literally – there was such a pungent smell of cooked electronics coming from the game, I thought I was going to open it up to flames). When stuff like that happens, you seriously start considering switching over to something newer that is going to be more reliable, especially if you can get something with different aspect ratio settings, good black levels and low input lag.

TRON 3 In Pre-Production – Back in the days when TRON: Legacy was in the works, we spoke of it often on Arcade Heroes – partially because I’m a big TRON fan (it was a strong influence for getting me into this business as I wanted to be like Kevin Flynn) but also because Disney’s huge viral marketing effort made it pretty easy given that they tied it to arcades over and over again – the Flynn’s Arcade at San Diego Comic Con, Arcade Aid scavenger hunts, Space Paranoids in arcade cabinets, and so on. It also gave us TRON Legacy Pinball by Stern and we almost got a new video arcade game out of it from Specular Interactive (which they proposed but it was unfortunately shot down at the time). Unfortunately TL did not do as well as the unrealistic expectations pegged it for, at the time it was talked about being the next AVATAR, which was downright silly and I don’t say that in hindsight as I thought it wasn’t realistic at the time as we were talking about a movie that was a sequel to something which was almost 30 years old and done by a first-time director. Now if James Cameron had directed TL then it would have been a different story.

Hopefully with whatever TRON 3 ends up being, expectations will be a little more grounded in reality. Legacy wasn’t without its faults, which have been covered in plenty of places, not to mention the film being the butt of disappointment jokes for a while. Granted I get that the point of the world in Legacy was supposed to be cold and dreary to get the point across of the dystopia but I’m hopeful that we will see a computer world akin to what we saw in the cartoon nobody watched, TRON: Uprising and in the excellent video game TRON 2.0. Both of those presented a world that was more alive and imaginative and they were able to work with the premises presented in the original film of the world inside of the computer being alive. which is what the original movie hinted at plenty of times of life in the computer.

I have some thoughts as to where TRON 3 might go, given the hints dropped in Legacy but we’ll just have to wait and see.

Name That Game #39 – Well last week was a breeze! Here are the answers, which were all correctly guessed at:

#1 – Bad Dudes Vs. Dragonninja by Data East

#2 – Ragnagard by Saurus

#3 – Fire Battle by Taito

This week’s games: