Mog Anarchy Visits The National Media Museum's GAME LOUNGE!

So, on Sunday I took a trip down to Bradford to visit the National Media Museum. It's a massive building that is full of media-related history - including TV, cinema, the Internet and of course, the floor I  was most interested in: VIDEO GAMES.

The 6th floor is home to the GAME LOUNGE; which is a big room filled with refurbished arcade cabinets and old consoles you can actually play on. I'd like to add that they're all free to play too - except Space Invaders (which costs 10p) and Point Blanc (which costs 50p) - admission into the museum is also totally free.

The cabinets included:

Space Invaders, Point Blank, Gauntlet, Donkey Kong, Defender, Asteroids & Frogger

The console games included:
Super Mario Kart, Pong, Manic Miner, Prince Of Persia, Goldeneye 64 & Sonic The Hedgehog 2

The whole Games Lounge is nicely decorated with full wall-length murals of classic video game iconography and even features these lovely Tetris-block seats to sit at to play the table-style arcade cabinets and console set-ups.

It also features a classic staple of virtually every British museum and tourist attraction - the penny press! Basically you pay a £1 coin and a 1p coin to flatten out the 1p coin and stamp a design onto it. Here's the two I got made - a Pac-Man one and a Space Invaders one.

To round this blog off nicely, here's a compilation of the videos I filmed during my trip; my guided tour of the Games Lounge and several videos of me being way too overexcited trying out the games and arcade cabinets - even losing my ZX Spectrum virginity, playing Manic Miner for the first time!

They also sold a wide array of gaming merchandise in the gift shop - including an awesome messenger bag, Tetris stickers, books, Pixel Bricks and more!

Minecraft Creations: Frostbite Sprite Statues

It's been a while, but it's time for some more Minecraft Creations. Shelly and I made this collection of sprite statues a few months back - Shelly having a great spatial awareness used screenshots from one of her favourite Atari 2600 games: Frostbite and squared paper to plan out these three statues.

Frostbite is a sort of platformer game in which you play as a little Eskimo dude called Bailey. Your task is to jump across ice floes in order to reach the other side of an icy river, where your igloo is. With each successful jump, more bricks are added to your igloo until it is complete and you can finish the level. As well as having to avoid falling into the water, you also need to avoid flying birds (we assume seagulls) and a hungry polar bear who prowls around outside your igloo.

We suspect that nobody else has ever made these before! We built these statues authentically in the icy area of our world, using wool and snow blocks.

This is a screenshot from the game:
(Just as a warning, if you're going to search for this yourself, don't forget to include "ATARI" in your search. Bloody hell...)

And this is a screenshot of our Minecraft sprite statues.

We also made a video:

Video Games In The Real World: The Powerpuff Girls Atari Easter Egg

Say hello to another frequent feature on my lovely blog.
 
Being a hardcore gamer, I'm less in touch with the world than most people - so I get very excited when I see references to video games in the real world. It is common to see real-world references in video games - but who says it can't go the other way too?
 
I'm a massive fan of The Powerpuff Girls, which is brimming with references to pop culture and weird little Easter eggs in every single series. I have the full box set of all 6 series (which I ordered from the US) and when watching it recently with my fiancée Shelly, we found this one.
 
I'd heard of this Easter egg before, but never actually seen it for myself. In episode 6A from series 3, 'Three Girls And A Monster', The Powerpuff Girls are arguing with one another over the best way to tackle this giant orange dinosaur monster. At one point when Blossom takes the lead, she calls out an attack pattern: "ALPHA, OMEGA, ATARI!"
 
And then they do this:
 

Yes, that's an upside-down Atari logo. And as Shelly is a huge fan of the Atari 2600, she squealed. I felt warm inside, seeing a perfect connection between The Powerpuff Girls and video games - two of my favourite things. Awesome. It's in the episode for only several seconds, but it's still awesome.