FINISH HIM!

Aw, that’s kinda sad. I mean they made all the old school coin ops like Space Invaders and Robotron 2048 and Xenophobe! True they’ve been floundering in the past decade or so, they even just released another kombat rehash versus DC comics characters. I get bored with fighting games pretty quickly, but this one is fun because you can kick people’s asses as Wonder Woman!

@drinkyclown: Hey, they made the classic pinball games I played as a ute. Those were the days, 1977, if I had 2 dollars, a pack of marlboros cost 50 cents, and I had 18 games of pinball from that dollar-fifty left over, that was saturday night out.

Was this the company that did Frogger? I used to rock that and Ms. Pac-Man at the roller rink in the early ’80s.

@Promnight:
I fed a lot of quarters in those things too… Williams, Midway, and Bally were the big three. It was nice when you found a soft one that gave up lots of extra balls, free games, and wouldn’t tilt if you dropped it out a window.

I never was very good though… usually my only hope for a free game was
the score match at “game over”

@fupduk: I sucked too, but I did master one game, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, I could play for an hour on a quarter.

Honestly I had no idea Midway was still in business. I thought the advent of videogames was the death knell of the arcades, the arcade games and the companies that made the games.

I used to take off from work at lunch and kill an afternoon with all the other suits at the arcade. I can remember the workers who ran the places always wore red vests and always had kind of puzzled looks like they couldn’t understand why there were executives monopolizing the games instead of the teens who came in when school was out. There was a lot of stress getting burned off every day at those arcades. Space Invaders by itself probably prevented hundreds of nervous breakdowns and thousands of ulcers.

Okay, we did musical theater ghey stuff this afternoon, here is a macho hetero-man gearhead test: what is the difference between a rat and a mouse?

On the same topic, Marissa Tomei, who has that wonderful scene in my cousin vinnie as the gearhead dreamgirl, has anyone seen The Wrestler? Oh My God. That must be a body double, right? I loved that movie, except, for god’s sake, handheld cameras throughout? It was kinda a little like Blair Witch Project. But amazing. The most Jersey movie ever made.

Have you guys heard the phrase “zombie banks”? I love it. Maybe we should recycle those posts on zombie attack preparation.

@Promnight: The Wrestler is more Jersey than The Sopranos? Half of that fucking HBO series was filmed within a five block radius of where I lived for a couple years in north Jersey.

@Promnight: It’s not gearhead until it involves compression ratios, cubic centimeters/liters/inches, gear ratios and (my personal favorite) power:weight ratios.

Ferinstance: assuming that my sorry legs are capable of putting out a burst of about 500 watts (which is a reasonable assumption for sprinting), that translates to .67 HP. I weigh about 230, my bike weighs about 40 lbs, and I usually carry about 10 lbs in a bag — total weight of 280. That would be 417 lbs per horsepower.

On my motorcycle (a Ninja 250), which puts out a claimed 36 HP at the crank, I weigh about 240 in riding gear, the bike weighs about 350 lbs, so the total is 590. That’s 16.4 lbs per horsepower, a much higher power:weight ratio.

For comparison, if I owned a 2009 Honda Civic, it would weigh 2630 lbs, and develop a claimed 140 HP. Add my portly 230 lbs to the car, and it’s at 2860 lbs. That works out to 20.4 lbs per horsepower, which is pretty good.

What do we learn from all this? I dunno, I was just having fun with the gearhead thing. Bicycles are slow? Motorcycles (even little tiny “beginner” bikes) are fast? Sure, I guess so.

ADD: much more terrifyingly, if we compare myself on a Yamaha R1 (1000cc, 454 lbs, 180 HP), it’s 3.9 lbs/hp. That is to say, so wicked fast it’s nearly incomprehensible.