Month: May 2022

Enlarge / The Starliner spacecraft landed within 500 meters of its intended target in New Mexico on Wednesday evening. (credit: NASA)

Steve Stich is a buttoned-down NASA engineer who has worked at the space agency for decades, dating back to the space shuttle's heyday in the 1980s. But on Wednesday night, as he contemplated the success of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft after its six-day mission to the International Space Station, he said he had the chills.

"I probably can’t express in words what it meant for me and the team to see the whole mission go well," Stich said during a news conference at Johnson Space Center in Houston. "That’s really what this commercial crew program has been all about. I’m getting goosebumps."

Stich has held a leadership position in NASA's commercial crew program to fly astronauts to the International Space Station for the last seven years. This was a bold bet by NASA, trusting private companies to build and fly new spacecraft with limited NASA oversight. Not everyone supported the initiative, and it has faced some technical challenges. But now NASA is close to its final aim, having two independent means of accessing low Earth orbit.

Enlarge / Blasting demons to the beat has never looked or felt sweeter. Welcome to the drop-D, first-person combat of Metal: Hellsinger.

When video games infuse music, rhythm, and tempo into their action, I'm typically first in line to try them. That's been the case since PaRappa the Rapper kicked and punched its way into my heart in late 1996. Ever since, I've strapped into VR, tested plastic instruments, visited elaborate arcades, and rocked out with the biggest and smallest experiments in the genre.

Through the decades, however, my dream peanut butter-and-chocolate gaming combo has yet to succeed: a first-person rhythm game. The indie roguelike BPM: Bullets Per Minute tried nailing that fusion in 2020 only to falter because, apparently, delivering Doom-like combat to the beat requires a graceful touch.

Hence, I was dubious when another contender to this unclaimed throne, Metal: Hellsinger, was announced as a similar "slay demons to the rhythm of heavy metal" quest. Its developers at Swedish upstart The Outsiders seem to understand that apprehension ahead of its launch on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation by the end of 2022, as they've emerged with the exact hands-on demo needed to put an exclamation point on their pitch. This game isn't just better than BPM. As much as I've loved the modern Doom reboot series, I'm wondering if Metal: Hellsinger might become the most headbang-worthy demon-blasting game ever.

Enlarge / A glimpse at what could have been... (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

For decades, Atari's scrapped prototype arcade sequel Marble Madness II has been one of the un-emulated "holy grails" for popular multi-platform emulator MAME. This has limited gameplay to a handful of rare cabinet collectors and convention goers. That changed this week, though, with the unexpected and unexplained leak of a full Marble Madness II ROM that can now be played by the world at large.

After confirming the ROM's authenticity by comparing its gameplay to extant footage, we looked into the how and why of getting this game running via emulation—and talked to community experts about Marble Madness II's unique mix of exciting arcade history and disappointing gameplay.

A tale of two Marble Madness II's

First, a bit of background. In 1991, seven years after the hit release of Marble Madness, Atari Games set out to create a sequel that included "more of everything," as designer Bob Flanagan put it in a 2020 interview with Antstream. That prototype sequel, subtitled Marble Man, packed in 17 large and complicated mazes, loads of new enemies, three-player support, a pinball-style bonus game, and even power-ups that let players fly across the level or crush threats in their path.