Gizmodo: breakout

Bally Pong Makes Gambling Even More Addictive

Mark Wilson — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 11:30:24 EDT

Atari's Pong is stealing our quarters once again, recently approved for use in a slot machine made by Bally: "Bally Pong." A cabinet decorated with chrome fixtures and retro fonts will be a pretty standard 5-line slot, though featuring two knobs for the 1-in-70 occurrence of a 45-second Pong minigame. And while earnings at this point are "skill based," will expert Pongers see a real payout advantage?

Yes. Those who succeed in the minigame will see a payout up to 7% higher—which is a huge amount in Vegas where the minimum payout is 75%. We're not big on the slots, but with PONG and the possibility of Breakout coming down the line, our mad gaming skills could pay off...literally. In all reality, we'll just be losing 7% less than all of our money. [forbes via therawfeed]

WSJ Pulp Skim: Stuffy Suits Addicted to Blackberry's Brickbreaker

Brian Lam — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 06:36:13 EST

The WSJ writes about suits who are addicted to more than thumbing their Blackberries, losing sleep and productivity to the handheld's built-in game, Brickbreaker. They play 'em in board meetings, and they play 'em on conference calls, and they worship the masters who can rack up over a million points.

I came away with two thoughts after reading this otherwise bullshit article. One, the guy who is known as Wall Street's highest paid CEO, who made 53 million bucks last year, doesn't play the game much. And none of the slackers in this article are getting promoted any time soon. Dear Idiots: You always wanted to be in the WSJ, but now you've tanked your career. Are you sure no press is bad press? –Brian Lam

P.S. One of Steve Jobs's projects at Atari was Breakout, the spiritual precursor to Arkanoid, and Brickbreaker.
[WSJ, reg required]

Live From CES: Gibson Digital Hands-On

Noah R — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 16:50:26 EST

Gibson is twanging about its digital guitar, and we spent some time strumming it today. This thing is amazing. It's a standard Les Paul axe with an RJ45-out instead of the usual amp line. Along with the classic pickups, it's got a HEX pickup (patent applied), which is really six discreet pickups (one for each string). The pickups sense both up-down and side-to-side motion—for each string. They also claim there is a separate of up to 90dB between each string.

The signal is sent via a proprietary MaGIC protocol to a BreakOut Box that is the width of one rack space and half the rack space wide. The box has 8 outputs (1/4-inch jacks), one for each string, one for the classic humbucking pickup and a pass-through for a microphone. You do not need to plug this into a computer, although that will give you even more cool things to play with.

So, what can you do with all this? Add delay to each string. Then assign each string a different channel for surround sound—it's true, I heard it. Another option is to use just the first and fourth inputs on the BreakOut Box which will assign the lower four to one channel, the upper four to the other channel and give you instant stereo.

This guitar does so much that even the guy on hand to demo it didn't understand it all. There is a mic input on the guitar, for one. The Gibson Digital will be available this quarter and retail for around $3,900.