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Videon Games |
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VideonGames.com
is edited by: Chris Range email: crange(at)celticgrove.com Videon Games Company PO Box 70227 Knoxville, TN 37938 |
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08/01/2003 - 09/01/2003 01/01/2004 - 02/01/2004 02/01/2004 - 03/01/2004 03/01/2004 - 04/01/2004 04/01/2004 - 05/01/2004 |
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Wednesday, April 28, 2004 |
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http://www.projectconstellation.us/news/archives/2004/04/01/nasa_spacecraft_flyoff_under_study
NASA's new space exploration initiative is currently undergoing a consideration for a flyoff study of the new Constellation spacecraft. |
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Wednesday, March 24, 2004 |
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Tuesday, February 24, 2004 |
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----File this one under total and complete geekdom.
http://www.ferraniait.com I collect cameras that were mass produced, and are now obsolete. They are not rare, not collectible and completely obsolete by virtue that nobody makes film for them anymore. These cameras are totally useless. They are useless as collector's items, and useless for taking pictures. Even Goodwill will refuse them. Nobody loves them except for me and a middle-aged guy from Ohio that lives with his mom and collects Smurfs. Oh but just try to keep an underdog down. Ferrania is an Italian film manufacturer who continue to push the technological progress of older film formats. Among products they make are 26mm (I126) and 110 film cartridges compatible with Instamatic cameras circa 1961-1994. I have several old Kodak Instamatics including one I carried to Canada, Mexico and other points west. Thanks to Ferrania, I can enjoy those cameras once again. The Ferrania film company has been around since 1912. Their main focus for the older film lines is in emerging markets like South America. But they aren't just reproducing old filmstock. Ferrania continues to advance the technology of the film formats themselves - so the pictures you take with a Ferrania 26mm cartridge today should be of much higher quality than those of the 1970s. (* Holds film box up to cheek - a lens flare crosses the scene and the spokesmodel is backlit. She winks and the foley artist makes something go Ping!) A box of 30 cartridges will be on its way to me soon. |
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Wednesday, February 18, 2004 |
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Big Brain Games is another GML game developer similar to Videon Games. Big Brain's newest game is called Logic War and it's so cool you couldn't melt it with a half-time wardrobe accident. In Logic War you pit your robot against other robots in an arena. Sounds like any old robot game right? Wrong; because in this game the robot runs independantly using an AI that you programmed ahead of time. You program your robot's logic by pasting the symbols of various functions onto a graphical 'circuit board'. Then you send your robot out into the big bad world of the Logic War. If you've done a good job of programming him, your bot will wipe the floor with its adversaries. Otherwise it's off to the scrap heap with ye. Logic War is still in beta, but it plays like a full-fledged pro. Download Logic War | |
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Wednesday, January 28, 2004 |
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Monday, January 26, 2004 |
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There are movies we like because they are art, because they are funny, or because they are timeless dramas. Often we like a movie just because it's fun. Everybody likes some bubblegum once in a while. People enjoy movies for a variety of reasons, but one of the simplest is that you remember it from childhood. That's how it is with me and Planet of the Apes. I don't want to overvaunt it the way it's so easy to do with movies from yesterday -- especially with science fiction. I don't think average people fainted at the site of the first movies featuring oncoming trains, shrieked when Rhett Butler said "dayum" on camera, or panicked in fear of the nihilistic scenes in Night of the Living Dead. Scary yes, panicky no.
People have tended to be more saavy than memory would like to credit. But however ham-fisted the moral, the famed last scene of POTA did make a statement. Like the expressionist German films of the 1920s (ok maybe not that high brow - heh heh) Planet of the Apes challenged our commonly-held conceit, that good always prevails and humanity will somehow survive. Yep, it's definitely a movie of its time. People just a few years younger than me don't remember the status quo that I simply took as gospel for most of my life before 1989. "The Russians and the U.S. have enough warheads pointed at each other to destroy the world 7 times over." So went the everyday reality. That's over now, for now at least. Today we face fleeter and more shadowy foes. But that's how it was then. I remember once at Scout camp in Whitesburg, TN, a camp counselor telling us a radio announcement had just confirmed that the Russians had launched a nuclear attack. "Pray for your families, and consider your lives boys. These may be your final moments." * Sound of crickets chirping. Instead of reacting with fear, most of us laughed it off. Were the attack real we'd have been turned to ash in a blinding moment, all the while convinced our troop leader was a terrible poker player. Not a bad way to go after a fashion. I can think of worse deaths than the one that smites you instantly while you are totally unaware. At any rate Planet of the Apes remains fodder for the kinds of conversations my friends and I used to revel in back in school days. We'd skip right past the improbabilities of apes developing speech and a full blown society within a space of 2,000 years. You took that for wrote. The REAL inconsistencies in a movie like Apes were questions like "Why would a crew of 4 astronauts travel into deep space in a capsule with only 2 seats?" Or "What idiot planned the mixture of 3 guys and 1 gal for a colonization mission?" Sheesh. Did the writer skip Biology 101? Too few seats, a bad mixture of sexes on the mission -- those are huge plotholes -- but talking monkies with a corrupt court system? Duh. Of course THAT is possible. Grin. Such are the arguments of geeks in their youth. Now that you understand the genesis of my deep analysis of Planet of the Apes, you can play along with one of my pet peeves. Not only does the Icarus have too few seats, they aren't very well designed either. The monstrous tubular throne chairs have tiny seatbelts that look way too flimsy to hold you in place for a rocket launch. And besides that they look really uncomfortable. They lean waaaayyy back like the bench seat of a 1972 Impala, making it impossible to reach the implausibly huge control panel cum stereo mixer. I disliked those chairs from the first time I saw them. It's one of those things that makes the movie less than perfect. No really. If you are the sort of person who notices what kind of chairs they used in Planet of the Apes, you'll probably also notice such things in Land of the Giants, or Babylon V. So it's that likelihood that lead me to notice this little bit of trivia Is this the same chair recycled over and over by Paramount during 3 decades of filmic history? Planet of the Apes was among the last of the big studio pictures. Studio pictures were made entirely in-house. Effects and set pieces were built on sound stages owned by the studio, not farmed out to ILM. And once a set piece was built, you might see it in movie after movie. But I'm thinking these tube chairs might be among the longest-lived. For the record, I've got no problem with a 50 foot tall monkey. King Kong himself is entirely probable. Just tell me this. Why would the islanders build a giant wall to keep out the giant monkey, and then build a giant door big enough for the giant monkey? That is a real mystery. |
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Saturday, January 24, 2004 |
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Boeing has wasted no time in posting up pictures of their proposed Total Solution for the new NASA space exploration initiative. To the keen eye the Crew Control Module looks a lot like an Apollo CM - and the Resource Module looks very similar to the Apollo SM. The Crew lunar habitat even has the same landing gear configuration as the Grumman LM. But this is a case where a leap backwards, is actually a leap forwards. At long last, we're finally returning to the frontier. [See the pictures] | |
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LUNAR RANGER LM SIMULATOR - VIDEON GAMES, distinctive titles, logos,
graphics and contents TM & © 2004 The Videon Games Company BT. All
Rights Reserved.
