Newsbytes: Joust Score Tour; Hot Rod Cafe in CT; Magician’s Dead Test; NTG#84

The week was a bit slow for news but there are a few items that have popped up in the news feeds for the weekend.

Lonnie McDonald Looking For Joust Arcade Machines – While most attention on winning high scores in the arcade universe lands on Donkey Kong, it isn’t the only  impressive world record to be had among arcade games. For Lonnie McDonald, the world record holder on Williams’ Joust, he’s been seeking to set a new kind of record for the game, by finding every single Joust arcade cabinet and post 9,999,999 point scores to the game. Finding these is no easy task so he reached out to us to share the story and the effort, which you can follow in more detail via Joustmaster.com. There is also a Joust machine registry, a Joust Tour tracker and a timeline of the tour. If you know of any machines out there he has missed, be sure to mention it!

Hot Rod Cafe in New London CT Holding A Soft Opening For Their New Bar/Arcade Tonight: As shown in this tweet below, if you are anywhere near New London, CT then some classic gaming combined with adult beverages is headed your way via the Hot Rod Cafe. They’ll have both pinball and video arcades although I have not found a list of the games yet. Give them your support if you are in the area!

Get a sneak peak and Join us this evening @7 pm for our downstairs bar arcade soft opening ! pic.twitter.com/zJn8mwqNif

— Hot Rod Cafe CT (@HotRodCafeNL) May 21, 2016

Magician’s Dead Location Test – Japanese studio Byking has begun testing their new original title Magician’s Dead over there and thanks to the test, we have a hands-on look as to how it plays. Movement is controlled via the Nunchuck-like Wii controller while spells are cast by waving certain hand gestures in front of the screen. Graphically it looks solid so far and like the controls work out pretty well. I’d love to test this one out in the States…I suppose we’ll have to keep an eye on Dave & Busters or Round1USA for that.

Pump It Up 1.17 Update: Andamiro has released this trailer to showcase additions to their latest update to the Pump It Up Prime series. Trailer for the Japanese Prime update can be found here.

Flyer of the Week: Mortal Kombat – When you aren’t trying to use ‘bits’ or ‘blast processing’ to market your game product, ‘realism’ always has its benefits. Mortal Kombat of course made a big deal out of pushing the fighter genre forward not only with its focus on more violent/bloody play but also improving the technology used in digitized sprites. It is really unfortunate that the MK series hasn’t found a place in arcades after MK4. At least we have this flyer to remember the run it had – along with the ‘fashions’ at the time. If you’ve ever worried about how poorly early 3D games age, just take a look at the shorts we were wearing back in the 90s 😛 Full flyer is @ FlyerFever.com.

“Your mother let you walk out of the house dressed like that? REALLY?”

Name That Game #84 – Last week had an odd assortment to guess on, although the 3rd one went unguessed. Here are the answers:

#1 – Line of Fire by Sega

#2 – Gururin by Face

#3 – Tee’d Off by Tecmo

This week lets go for some games you don’t exactly come across at the arcade every day…