Newsbytes: Beat Saber Arcade; Willy Crash; Rifftrax Plays Krull; Starwing Paradox; Cinematronics FPGA; & More

Greetings, programs! It’s Labor Day weekend in the US, meaning that a lot of people are out and about for a last minute Summer vacation.

Beat Saber Arcade Announced

One VR title I’ve heard a lot of positive things about is Beat Saber. It’s a rhythm game meets light-sabers, a simple concept that has plenty of “geek appeal” built into it. The developers also see where this can find appeal on the arcade market, signing a contract with Skonec Entertainment to produce proper arcade builds of the game. I am not familiar with Skonec, so after a little digging find that they have fully embraced VR for the past four years; I just don’t know how much arcade experience they have. This edition of the game will include more K-Pop I am sure that IAAPA 2018 will have an extensive VR area once again, so perhaps this will be there to check out (and no, you don’t wield real light-sabers as pictured :P)

Bay Tek Games Releases Willy Crash

Mentioned on the site a little while back, Bay Tek Games is busy producing their latest videmption game for the arcade market, Willy Crash. This trailer posted YouTube earlier this week seems to be a launch trailer, going through the various game features. It also promotes the iOS/Android app. I imagine we’ll be seeing this one at IAAPA 2018.

Rifftrax Plays Krull

I meant to post this last week when it was “fresh,” but in my rush to take care of other things in the day, I forgot it. That’s ok, as it’s still worth talking about. For those who don’t know, Rifftrax is a group of comedians who watch bad movies and “riff” on them. The three principal comics were stars on Mystery Science Theater 3000, a TV show in the ’90s that watched old, cruddy movies and made fun of them. Last week, Rifftrax did a nationwide showing for the 1983 fantasy film Krull, and to celebrate that, they made this video. There is some profanity, and they play some non-arcade Krull games such as the Atari 2600 version(which they weren’t very good at :P); the arcade version starts at 11:30; 20 minutes in they just give up and start playing games like Megaman:

Square Enix Continuing To Hype Starwing Paradox

While this does look cool, I’ve been told that Japanese operators aren’t exactly chomping at the bit to grab this one due to a very high price tag.

Cinematronics Arcade Titles On FPGA – Cinevectron

FPGA, is there anything it can’t do? Ok, that’s just a tiny bit sarcastic, but I’m always excited to see old games come to life in hardware as opposed to software emulation. Given the right setup, this can give a better lease of life to arcade cabinets then something like MAME can. If you would like to follow the development of this particular project, check out their blog.

House Of The Dead – From 1996-Today

In case you wanted a nice visual aide for seeing how Sega’s House Of The Dead has changed over the past 22 years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gdsu5fGWtIg

Splash! Spotted At John’s Incredible Pizza

You might recall from way back (Jan. 2017 to be exact), that Raw Thrills was showing off a jet ski racing game by the name of Splash!. The game disappeared as quickly as it appeared, never hitting production, nor showing up at a trade show in the US as far as I know. So finding this Instagram video was a bit of a surprise, showing that a pair of units have been/were installed at the John’s Incredible Pizza in Newark, NJ. This video was taken back in May however, so it’s unknown whether or not the game is still there; you can also see that one unit was down from this brief clip. Here’s a link to it in case the embed below doesn’t work.

(Thanks to Jdevy for this tip)

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That’s all I have for now – have a great weekend and if your in the US, a fun and safe Labor Day!