Playable LEGO PONG Set Turns up on LEGO Ideas

LEGO maniac TheBananaman2018 has built a fully playable, motorized version of PONG that can be built out of LEGO bricks. He’s added the set to the LEGO Ideas website, and with enough support, LEGO may consider it for production. I don’t know about you, but I just created like twenty accounts and pledged my support from all of them. This might be the most important thing I do in my life.

“The game is played by two players; each of them has a paddle on the right or left side of the screen. There’s also a ball that flies around the whole screen, bouncing off the sides. The players need to move their paddles so that the ball never reaches the left or right side of the screen. If that happens, one of the players scores a point. The machine counts and displays points automatically. When a player scores 5 points, it displays the message “YOU WON!” instead of how many points the player has.” Impressive!

Amazingly, the game (which features over 90 gears) runs off a single motor, including the scorekeeping. Wow! I can’t even imagine the amount of engineering that went into its development but rest assured, it’s way over my head. Honestly, most things are. Don’t even get me started on photosynthesis OR magnets.

[LEGO Ideas]

Atari’s latest attempt at milking nostalgia is a ‘Pong’ RPG

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Go Back to the Arcade with the Pong-inspired OriginX Cabinet

Back in the day, most of the games in arcades were stand-up cabinets, but a few were sit down table style games. I don’t remember ever seeing wall mounted arcade games back in the day, but there are a handful of them available these days. Industrial designer Love Hulten is showing off a slick wall-mounted arcade machine that looks like it was transported from the early days of video games.

The OriginX looks like it came straight out of the arcade days because it’s an obvious homage to the original Pong cabinet from 1972. Inside the cabinet is a modern computer that has all the old games you might want to play, thanks to MAME. It can be customized to run the original JAMMA board of your choice though if you prefer to run with original hardware.

It has a 19-inch 4:3 LCD and a custom barrel distortion filter to mimic CRT monitors from the arcades of yore. The cabinet can be customized to your color desires and only 50 units will be made.  This thing is far from cheap, selling in Europe for €2,899 or about $3,400 (USD). There is no word on availability outside of Europe, but hopefully you’ll be able to buy one of these stateside if you’ve got deep enough pockets.

[via Love Hulten]

Pinball + Air Hockey + Wall Climbing = Climball

Augmented reality is the current hot trend in gaming, largely due to the success of Pokémon GO. Here’s another interesting game that uses augmented reality in a different way. It combines pinball with air hockey and wall climbing. It is called Climball and it looks like a lot of fun.

augmented_reality_wall_1
Augmented Climbing, a Finland-based company, has a great new way to get in shape. Climball projects a ball on a climbing wall which is divided into two sections. These two sections are the playing area for each player. The idea is to kick the virtual ball into the opponent’s court and avoid losing the ball in their own court. Think air hockey, or Pong on a vertical wall.

Since you have to hang onto a climbing wall while playing, this game has got to be more difficult than it looks, but it looks like a lot of fun.

[via TheNextWeb via DamnGeeky]