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Game-related record sleeve art hurts our brains
Video game soundtracks might be a big deal nowadays, but back in the '80s the video-game-related albums at the record store tended to be a little different. AZ Nighbuzz has assembled a collection of some of the wonderfully weird game-related album art from the golden age of the arcades.While various international versions of Pac-Man Fever clog up the list, the selections include everything from spoken word strategy to a Breakout backstory and even a Super Mario Land remix that was pressed onto vinyl as late as 1992. Our favorite, though, has to be the inexplicably weird cover for Scientist Encounters Pac-Man, in which a metal, piranha-toothed monstrosity devours a dark-skinned man (presumably the Scientist?) in futuristic skin-tight garb. They just don't make album art like that any more. Thank goodness.
ELP Declicker cleans up your vinyl
We know how annoying it is when you're trying to bounce all of your old Rush LPs to FLAC (you know, so you can jam to Moving Pictures on the go), and your files are filled with ugly surface noise. Well, ELP (the company, not Emerson, Lake, and Palmer) feels your pain -- and it wants to help. For the low, low price of $2500 you can supposedly rid your music of pops and clicks (but not hiss, strangely) with the turn of a knob. Of course, there are much cheaper software options for this sort of thing, and you can't use it on 78s, but you probably won't be worried about that once you hear how good Tom Sawyer sounds.[Thanks, Matt]
Wii hits 100,000 in Australia, breaks more records
The Wii is lightning fast in Australia. It was already the fastest selling console at launch, and now the Wii has surpassed yet another milestone, selling over 100,000 consoles down under in less than six and-a-half months.This beats the Xbox 360's previous record, which was 100,000 consoles in approximately seven months, Gamespot News reports. The Nintendo Wii launched in Australia on December 7, 2006. We'll have to wait and see whether the PS3, which launched on March 23, 2007, can outpace Nintendo's speedy little machine.
Guinness to legitimize couch potatoes with video game records
Guinness is poised to release a new series of record books with specific themes, and the first one is titled Guinness World Records Videogame Edition 2008. The tome will include stats on "which pro gamers earn the most money," "fastest times," "sales figures," and this perplexing nugget: "the single highest score ever achieved in a game." Really? It seems like anyone could easily beat that record by creating their own game with ridiculous scoring. ("Press 'x' to score eleventy bajillion points, to the power of infinity.") But who are we to criticize? We should just be psyched that somebody's making us feel like we're achieving something by spending the next month with a bag of chocolate-covered pretzels and Super Paper Mario.
Motorola sponsoring attempt at 'world's highest cellphone call'
We're pretty happy with just being able to get a clear cellular signal at our desk during the day, but a British mountain climber named Rod Bader seemingly won't be satisfied until he's able to gobble up some airtime minutes on top of the highest mountain on Earth. In a rather silly publicity stunt sponsored by Motorola, Bader will attempt to climb Mount Everest in late May, and, weather permitting, place a phone call from the summit through a tower located in China that has a clear line of sight to the north side of the peak. However, this means that world record holder Bader (he's climbed more of the world's highest points than anyone else, apparently) will need to follow a more difficult route to the top, and although he will have a support crew tagging along, the lack of Powersauce bars may prove to be his undoing. Oh, and if Bader emerges triumphant by asking someone "Can you hear me now?" for the record-breaking call, we've already hired some sherpas to ensure that he never makes it down from that mountain.
DS and PSP will outdo home consoles
Market analysts at DFC International are predicting that handheld consoles will rule by 2011, with the DS and PSP having a larger combined userbase than the three current home consoles. They also see a chance that the DS will become the best-selling console in history.The best-selling console in history. We're a whole website about how awesome the DS is, and that still sounds strange to us. Our quirky little handheld outselling things like the NES and the Playstation? We should be used to this kind of news by now, since the DS continues to sell like crazy. Maybe by 2011 everyone who wanted a DS will have been able to find one! That would be a welcome market trend.[Via PSP Fanboy]
Gamecube for Wii credit, and tomorrow's chaos
Perhaps some of you are reading this article via your smartphone, waiting in bitter cold weather because you're sick and tired of not having a precious Nintendo Wii. We understand. Tomorrow's deluge of Wii's, which should be occurring at many nation-wide outlets (Best Buy, Target, and Circuit City all seem to be proper candidates), may make many people quite happy. It may make many people really, really pissed off.While you might be willing to spend whatever it takes, we have a bit of thrifty advice. First off, EB Games is taking your soon-to-be-completely-worthless Gamecube as fifty dollars of trade-in credit for a Wii. Normally, they only give twenty-five. While EBG and Gamestop have not been officially confirmed as having units available for tomorrow, it's worth a phone call (why would they advertise such a deal if it were impossible to use?). Also, it seems Tower Records is having a massive sale, with 25% off of pretty much everything, including games. Pick 'em up cheap! And good luck, troopers.[Thanks, Dave and Vincent!]
EMI puts your medical history on a digital business card
While having your entire catalog of medical issues on your person at all times would sure come in handy if your GPS leads you into a body of water or you get mangled by a Japanese Land Walker, implanting an RFID data chip underneath your skin could (understandably) sound a bit extreme. While digital medical records and emergency panic buttons are certainly swell, EMI's 911 rCard places every quirk and prior health issue you've ever had onto a single wallet-sized card, which can be viewed immediately by any medical personnel that would need pertinent information statinum. The "vivid, full color LCD" can display everything from medical charts to photos / text describing the patient's history, and sports a built-in battery that can handle "about two hours" of constant viewing before it needs recharging. Boasting USB connectivity, users can continually update and upload new information from their EMI web portal onto the rCard, including any mild injuries sustained during last week's campouts. The 911 rCard is available now for $79.95, which includes a USB cable / charger and the first year of website access, while additional years of data storage and interfacing will run you $20.[Via EverythingUSB]
Custom car builder creates "world's fastest office"
In a sure sign that they really will let just about anyone into the popular Guinness Book these days, an English gentleman named Edd China has just earned himself the coveted award for "world's fastest office" after pushing his Rover 100-powered desk-on-wheels to 87mph on a British racetrack. China -- who began building custom vehicles for a charity event and now designs them on commission with his company, Cummfy Banana -- has already assembled such masterpieces as a rolling sofa, mobile shed, drivable bed (what we call a "pickup truck" here in America), and most practical of all, a motorized bathroom. Although all of his creations are actually street-legal, China nonetheless gets pulled over on a regular basis -- though sometimes the cops just harass him for a photo op -- with his personal best being 12 traffic stops in one day. As the NASCAR-like decals indicate, the £45,000 ($85,700) mobile office (dubbed the "hot-desk") was originally built for a stationary firm, and comes complete with a keyboard steering wheel, mousepad horn, briefcase-based controls, and even a working computer and water cooler. Next up for China is a functional kitchen that he and a chef can roll around in, although for the kind of loot it takes to build these one-of-a-kind novelties, he might be better off just picking up a used RV and stuffing the luggage compartment full of caviar and filet mignon.
Pokemond Diamond and Pearl break sales records?
We knew the launch was crazy, but this is ridiculous: some (unconfirmed) sources over at 4 color rebellion are stating that the entire launch allocation of two million copies of Pokemon Diamond and Pearl have completed sold out ... in less than a day. Furthermore, half a million DS Lites (including the new special edition, shown here) flew off the shelves as well. Next week's sales numbers should be ... interesting, to say the least. We're not sure, but this might be an all-time sales record in Japan, and if one takes into account the proportional population of Japan versus the U.S., Pokemon Diamond and Pearl exceeds even Halo 2's ridiculous first day numbers (2.4 million sold in 24 hours). Take that, Master Chief.
IBM, GIT overclock chip to 500GHz
If you were wowed by those Japanese modders who overclocked their stock CPU to 7GHz, wait till you hear about IBM's latest foray into the world of ultra-fast computing: together with researchers from the digital camera-hating Georgia Institute of Technology, Big Blue has managed to overclock a chip to an unheard of 500GHz. Granted, the model they used already had a blistering native clock speed of 350GHz to begin with, but we're still floored that you could actually coax a small silicon wafer into operating at an incredible half-terahertz. As you probably suspected, there's no way to achieve speeds like this at room temperature, so the team froze their high-performance silicon-germanium chip to a super-chilly negative 451-degrees Fahrenheit, which is just eight degrees above absolute zero. Unfortunately, after learning about this breakthrough, electronics giant Sony apparently felt that consumers would no longer be impressed with their much-hyped Cell processor, so they've once again delayed the PS3 until IBM can make the liquid helium-cooled CPUs suitable for mass production . Expect the 500GHz PS3 to hit stores sometime in 2011.[Thanks, bento-san]
