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    • Pacific Pinball Museum offers old school thrills

      One of several rooms full of nostalgia at the Pacific Pinball Museum in Alameda, CA. (Photo: Mike Krumboltz)"The landlord said we'd never make it," said Michael Schiess, executive director of the Pacific Pinball Museum in Alameda, California. "We were really just a hole in the wall, a speakeasy kind of thing." Flash forward ten years and the museum has proved the landlord dead wrong.

      The place now includes several rooms, each filled with tables from different eras. In the front are dozens of old-school machines. "I like to make the customers at least walk past the classic tables," said Schiess. On the walls are gigantic murals of pinball art painted by Dan Fontes, board member and volunteer.

      Technically it's a museum, but unlike at the Louvre, you won't get arrested for playing with the art. For a flat fee ($15), visitors can shoot the silver ball until their flipper fingers fall off.

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    • Was it a hint at one of the new Xbox's features? Was it a friendly argument that spun out of control? Either way, a tweet from a Microsoft bigwig has turned into a public relations debacle.

      Microsoft Studios' creative director Adam Orth took to Twitter Thursday to comment on the growing gamer disgust with "always on" DRM, essentially technology that requires a game or device to be connected to the internet to work properly. That tech made the launches of high-profile PC games Diablo III and SimCity disastrous, and rumors are swirling that it will be included in the next Xbox system as a means to thwart used game sales.

      Orth, however, just doesn’t understand why people hate it.

      Read More »from Microsoft exec stirs up controversy with ‘always on’ Xbox Twitter tirade
    • Thief sneaks back into the spotlight

      Thief (Credit: Square-Enix/Eidos Montreal)You can’t keep a good criminal down.

      Despite the lack of a number in its title, Thief is formally the fourth game in the vaunted stealth franchise. It’s a name that should be instantly familiar to gamers of a certain age and persuasion, as the prior Thief games pretty much wrote the book on first-person stealth. The next game, which is due out in 2014 for the PC and next-gen consoles, recalls its former glory while borrowing a few pages from a more recent stealthy hit, Bethesda’s Dishonored.

      Set in a grungy Victorian town called simply “The City,” the game stars series mainstay Garrett, who is out to stick it to The Man by scurrying about the dank streets and mercilessly pilfering from the

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    • Ray Liotta, sorta (Credit: Activision/Treyarch)Activision has never been afraid to go big with its expansions for Call of Duty, but the next bit of downloadable content makes an offer you might not want to refuse.

      Uprising, the next downloadable expansion for the billion-selling shooter, will feature four new diverse multiplayer maps and a new Zombie mode that features four of Hollywood's go-to actors for mafia-themed films.

      Read More »from Black Ops II ‘Uprising’ to feature Hollywood’s top mob men
    • Disney shuts down LucasArts

      Gamers who felt a great disturbance in the Force Wednesday -- as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced -- weren't imagining things.

      Disney has shuttered LucasArts, the long-running game development wing of Lucasfilm, effectively ending all internal development at the company and laying off the majority of the staff.

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    • Marty Cooper (Credit: Eric Risberg / Associated Press)When historians start to suss out the people who had the biggest global impact of the 20th century, Marty Cooper may well be among the frontrunners.

      Forty years ago today, Cooper made the first call ever on a portable cellular phone, a device he and his team at Motorola had just completed. (That call, ironically, was to the head of the research department at rival Bell Labs, which was racing Motorola to invent the technology.)

      Read More »from Happy 40th birthday, cell phones!
    • A Game for Someone (Credit: Jason Rohrer/Polygon)Video game fans are used to hot games being delayed, sometimes for months or even years at a time.

      But a board game that scooped a major award at the recent Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco presents them with a wait that even the most patient of gamers will have trouble standing: almost three thousand years.

      Read More »from ‘Humanity’s last game’ buried somewhere in Nevada desert
    • With this snitch I thee wed. (Warner Bros.)Ron and Hermione? Pfft. Two Harry Potter fans are on their way to the altar, thanks to a proposal Dumbledore himself would have approved of.

      When Rachel Allison met Jaquie Richards in college, the two quickly became friends – and then something more. Richards was the original Potterhead, but quickly brought Allison on board – so when Allison decided to propose, it wasn't that hard to determine a theme.

      Read More »from Expecto Matrimonium! The Harry Potter wedding proposal
    • Images: LEGO; Arild Vagen/Wikimedia CommonsWhat do a science-fiction slug-overlord, Lego, and one of the world's greatest architectural masterpieces have in common?  Read on to find out.

      The Danish toy maker is being called culturally insensitive after releasing a model of "Star Wars" gangster Jabba the Hutt's palace that closely resembles a Turkish mosque. Lego says it will stop selling the toy – but denies the decision was tied to the protests.

      The Palace, say critics, looks very much like Istanbul's Hagia Sophia, a historic mosque that became a model for other centers of Islam. It's a museum these days, but the chairman of the Turkish Cultural Association of Australia still takes issue with the likeness being tied to George Lucas' famous villain.

      Read More »from Lego Star Wars toy resembles mosque, critics say
    • The Hidden Profits Behind Free Videogames

      The recent announcement by Blizzard Entertainment that it would be giving its next game away for free might have startled some investors.

      Blizzard, after all, is the talent behind some of the industry's biggest powerhouses, including "World of Warcraft" and "Diablo," and has generated billions of dollars for parent Activision. But the seemingly sudden burst of generosity could turn out to be one of developer's most savvy ideas to date.

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