BIKER WEREWOLVES VS MRS SATAN

ITEM [via Def Agent lorilori ]: And now, a relic from the Golden Age of cinema, when all you needed to make a movie were some motorbikes, werewolf masks, hooded robes, fire, a case of beer, a topless girl and a snake.

I don’t know about you, but I think every movie should have a topless snake dance and a werewolf jumping a bike WHILE ON FIRE. 2012 could have used both.

The smell of burning leather,

This is dF

WORLD OF OBAMACRAFT

Our apartment building has an SRO dish that pumps free satellite channels to every flat. We’re not talking free HBO here, but usually national flagship channels like Arirang (Korea), the Australia Channel, etc. Fashion TV and Al-Jazeera is about as premium as it gets.

For reasons I’m not very clear on, we also get a 24-Hour news channel from Russia. In English. Which is how I found out about the hottest online game in America:



According to Wired, it’s basically a simplified version of Axis And Allies based on the premise that Obama really is as evil as the average Teabagger says he is:

To prevent a midterm recasting of Congress, Obama suspends the Second Amendment and dissolves the United States in order to form The North American People’s Union with Canada and Mexico. The people rise up in arms, combating the Marxist forces of Obama’s loyalist Black Tigers, the Islamic fundamentalist Nation of Malsi and The Cong — a group of deposed Democratic congressional leaders – as well as whatever government troops choose to align themselves with the errant administration.

Well, of course.

Interestingly, the game was created by Libertarians who supported Ron Paul, one of whom is promising another version of the game featuring George W Bush as the evil dictator who destroys America.

Still, the co-founder in the Russia Today piece (who is not the same co-founder who talked to Wired) sounds jolly convinced that Obama’s policies really will lead to The North American People’s Union. On the other hand, he’s got a game to sell and a dream demographic that thinks this a documentary in progress. So really, what else is he going to say?

Looking forward to the Dubya version.

Game on,

This is dF

WHO KILLED THE PINBALLS? PINBALL KILLED THE PINBALLS

ITEM: Cheap Talk has an interesting piece on pinball technology and economics in the 1980s – specifically, how the games Black Knight and High Speed changed the pinball industry – and eventually killed it.

Which is probably meaningless to most of you. But it interests me in no small part because I got into pinball just a couple of years before Black Knight came out in 1980, which not only brought pinball into the digital age, but also introduced the concept of an elevated playing area within the table and, of course, multiball.

Turns out High Speed – which came out six years later – was even more advanced, because the boffins at Williams figured out how to use the software to create dynamic incentives for replays.

Pre-1986, the replay score was hard wired into the game unless the operator manually re-programmed the software. High Speed changed all that. It was pre-loaded with an algorithm that adjusted the replay score according to the distribution of scores on the specified machine over a specific time interval.

Both tables paved the way for more challenging games, which was necessary because – unlike video games – the necessary skills to play can be used on any machine. On the downside, the more challenging the games became, the less likely newbies would try them, limiting yr traffic to the hardcore pinball crowd.

And so pinball became too clever for its own good, basically.

That’s too bad. I dropped hundreds of thousands of quarters into pinball coin slots between 1978 and 1999 (which was the last time the local arcades in Hong Kong had a working pinball game – they are gone now). It was money well spent.

Anyway, it’s nice to know some of the tech tricks behind it all, even though admittedly hearing tales of how pinball makers game the players is kind of like hearing about pro wrestling really works, or how stage magicians saw women in half. You know yr being swindled, but in a way that’s also what yr paying for.

Under the table,

This is dF