Hasta La Gadget!

If you’re a fan of rock ‘n roll, odds are you’re familiar with the band Queen, and you know the late vocal talent of Freddie Mercury was the frontman for the group. To celebrate his birthday, Rovio made Freddie Mercury an honorary member of the Angry Birds family.

Rovio has released a new animation featuring Freddie the Angry Bird riding his bicycle to a famous Queen song called “Bicycle Race.” The video is live as of right now and you can view below. The video shows a birdified Mercury cruising on his bicycle wearing his Queen crown.

The mustachioed avian animation was created in support of the Mercury Phoenix Trust and Freddie for a Day, an event planned for September 5th to help raise funds for the fight against AIDS.

This wouldn’t be the first, most accurate, or even the first reinterpreted version of the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Gun I’ve ever seen, but it might just be the most awesome. Instead of being made out of slick plastic or fiberglass, this version is handcrafted from more traditional materials.

Sculptor Duncan Shirah created this Portal gun using wood, metal and glass, and it has an elegant look all its own. It’s almost like Chell got transported back to the Victorian era at some point during her time-travel escapades in Portal 2, and was bestowed with this wooden beauty. I wonder what a wooden Wheatley with a glass eyeball would look like? Or a brass GLaDOS?

There’s no indication if Duncan would consider building more of these if you offered him enough money, but you can check out more of his works and get in touch with him over on his website or Facebook.

[via Reddit]

Systems such as the ColecoVision, TurboGrafx-16 and 3DO may have been ousted from most home entertainment centers long ago, but they still have shelf space at the University of Michigan’s Computer and Video Game Archive. Slashdot caught up with Engineering Librarian and Video Game Archivist Dave Carter and took a look inside the repository, which has curated around 35 classic and current-gen platforms and more than 3,000 different games. Having “one of everything” is the project’s ultimate goal, but the logistics of acquiring every new game make achieving that feat a stretch. “Our realistic goal is to be sort of representative of the history of video games, what was important — what was interesting,” Carter said. “And then, not only to preserve the games, but also to preserve the game playing experience.” As a “useable archive,” patrons of UM’s library can dig in and play at different stations with era-appropriate monitors and displays. While many visit for leisure, students have used the resource to research topics ranging from music composition to the effects of texting while driving (using an Xbox 360 racing title and steering wheel peripheral, of course). You can catch a glimpse of the collection in the video below or visit the archive’s blog at the more coverage link.

Continue reading University of Michigan’s Computer and Video Game Archive houses over 3,000 different games, roughly 35 unique consoles (video)

Filed under: Gaming, Alt

University of Michigan’s Computer and Video Game Archive houses over 3,000 different games, roughly 35 unique consoles (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 31 Aug 2012 20:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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My millions of imaginary readers know how disappointed I am at the lack of a universal gaming controller for iOS devices. Archos added a pinch of envy to that disappointment when they unveiled the GamePad, a 7″ Android tablet that has physical buttons and two analog sticks. The best part? Archos claims to have developed a “mapping and game recognition” software that will allow virtual controls to be mapped to its buttons, even for games that don’t actually support physical controllers.

On the hardware side, all we know is that the GamePad has a 1.5GHz dual-core CPU and a Mali 400mp quad-core GPU. Archos also didn’t specify which version of Android will run on the tablet, although the company did say that they decided to build the GamePad when they saw that Android 4.0 aka Ice Cream Sandwich supported game controllers. Finally, Archos claims that there are already “over a thousand” Android games that work with the GamePad’s physical controls. I hope we can see a demo of this tablet soon and I really hope it takes off so everyone else can step their tablet game up.

[via Archos (pdf) via SlashGear]

Atari is big on nostalgia this year, but it hasn’t had much in the way of software to reflect the trip down memory lane beyond the existing mobile apps. Its remedy to that shortfall is full of 2012 buzzwords. The new Atari Arcade includes modern takes on eight classic Atari 2600 games, all built entirely with HTML5 and free to play. As fun as that promises to be, our interest is most piqued by the game library’s open-ended nature; this isn’t just an alternative to firing up a smartphone. A new Javascript kit lets developers not only build their own games but make money as they see fit, whether it’s through ads or in-app purchases. Whether they’re new or old, titles work in multiple contemporary browsers, although Microsoft would really, really like you to know that the games are ad-free and touch-optimized for both Windows 8 tablets as well as Internet Explorer 10. We’ll try to remember that when we look to relive our Combat memories on a Surface.

Continue reading Atari ports classic games to HTML5 for web and Windows 8, lets developers craft their own (video)

Filed under: Gaming, Tablets, Internet

Atari ports classic games to HTML5 for web and Windows 8, lets developers craft their own (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Aug 2012 15:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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