supersonic
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Supersonic Wii: Classic music game revived through homebrew
We miss Harmonix's pre-Guitar Hero games FreQuency and Amplitude. Well, we don't miss them -- we've got them right here on the shelf -- but we're sad that Harmonix's plastic-instrument games got so ridiculously popular and the company left its more complex, musically varied series behind.Aaron Lindsay and Kevin Dodge, rather than just writing wistful blog posts about the defunct series, have created a homebrew "tribute" to Amplitude on the Wii. Supersonic Wii: Winter Edition, submitted to the Drunkencoders Winter Compo, is a pretty accurate imitation of Amplitude, right down to the typeface. In Supersonic, as in Amplitude, various instruments in a song correspond to "tracks" on the game field, and players must complete measures on each track, quickly jumping from track to track to maintain combos. The game features nine songs, and is totally free! Provided you can run Wii homebrew, of course. If not, there's potentially some cost involved with the setup. Check after the break for gameplay footage![Via 4cr]
Reaction Engines' A2 supersonic jet could easily humble the Concorde
Concorde, schmoncorde. At least that's what we assume Reaction Engines' A2 would utter if it could in fact speak. The supersonic jet, designed by Oxfordshire's own Reaction Engines, could one day shuttle passengers from Europe to Down Under in less than five hours, cruising at up to 4,000 miles-per-hour along the way. Granted, the aircraft is still in concept mode at the moment, but if all goes to plan, it could be operational "within 25 years." Reportedly, the 156-yard long jet could maintain a speed of 3,800 miles-per-hour -- over twice that of the famed Concorde -- and could carry 300 guests on each trip. Who knows how much a seat would cost, but we're guessing the sky's the limit.[Via Engadget Spanish]
QSST, new supersonic jet, will travel coast-to-coast in two hours
Many of us here at Engadget are, or at least wish we were, the jetsetting type. The type to constantly bounce around to Boston, San Francisco, Hong Kong and other exotic locales. We'd definitely appreciate being able to traverse the continent in two hours, and while our overloads, erm, friendly bosses might appreciate that, our accounting department probably wouldn't. And surely this new generation of supersonic flights, which will reach top speeds of Mach 1.8, aren't going to come cheap. According to Wired News, this new supersonic private jet, called QSST ("quiet supersonic travel") is in production by Lockheed Martin. The new jet sports a "patented inverted V-tail", which will reduce the sound of its sonic boom to less than a hundredth of the original Concorde, one of the reasons why it was met with limited success in the US. The QSST's current price tag of $80 million is still cheap by comparison to the first generation of Concorde jets, which cost $46 million in 1977 (nearly $150 million in 2005 dollars when adjusted for inflation). So save your pennies, kids, we'll be saving ours.
