Weird Gaming News, November 2021 - Article
by VGChartz Staff , posted on 30 November 2021 / 4,068 Views
Ah, November. It's my birthday month, and also the month I got Covid! Neato! It’s also the month that people either get super excited for Christmas, or complain about people getting super excited for Christmas too early. Of course I’ve been getting excited since July.
Smell Like a 70s Pub With SEGA Colognes
SEGA has launched a cologne line, which includes colognes based on the Yakuza, Shenmue, and Sonic series. Two of the three are named after smoking, as if to give everyone a pretty bleak view of what Japan smells like.
The three colognes are called: 'Tobacco and Gold' (Shenmue), 'Bourbon and Smoke' (Yakuza), and 'Blue Blur' (James Pond, but played underwater).
This isn’t the first time that video game colognes have popped up; Capcom released a nemesis fragrance for Resident Evil 3, and UK retailer GAME launched a couple based on different video game series. There are also a fair few Star Trek fragrances - I recommend Red Shirt.
The colognes are expected to launch March 2022 and are up for pre-order via SEGA.
Someone is Hoarding Copies of a Burger King Game
Here in the UK we don’t seem to get the fast food video game craze, which means Sneak King managed to sneak by us. But in America Sneak King is apparently so loved that one man is hoarding copies of it.
Sneak King apparently has the player take control of the Burger King and sneak around, giving food to hungry people. Which is kind of weird and creepy. Oddly enough the game was developed by a now defunct UK developer called Blitz Games.
So how many games does the hoarder, Leroy Patterson, have? As of the last update he had 2,706 copies of the game. Why? Well, he picked up 50 copies of it at a second hand shop, and things spiralled from there.
Probably the most impressive part of all this is that he has the space to store so many copies of just one game.
Rat Doom
Rat Doom. The best thing I've ever written!
I hate writing a weird news article without featuring a piece of Doom news. We’ve had Doom running on a pregnancy test, Doom running on a fridge, and now a rat playing Doom - you know, for science.
Neuroengineer Viktor Toth took three rats - Carmack, Romero and Tom - then did what any normal person would do, he asked "do you guys like Doom?" Toth made a simple level for the rats to navigate and fed them sugared water through a tube when they progressed. There was even an enemy for the rats to defeat.
In his write up, Toth explains how the rats defeated the monster:
"Simply put, the training procedure would go as follows: the rat walks into a monster → the software detects that the monster is in the proximity of the player (and for now, let’s assume that the player is facing it) → initially the rat has no idea what to do in this situation, so the training software activates the push-pull solenoid lifting the animal slightly upwards → the head of the actuator then touches the button → monster gets shot down → reward in the form of sugary water is released to reinforce the behavior."
Be sure to read December’s weird news to see Peta’s inevitable response. And just in case someone brings it up, yes it's Doom 2, not the original Doom.
Microsoft Immortalizes its Failure
We heard back in January that Nintendo flatly laughed at Microsoft when the American giant attempted to acquire Nintendo back in the late 90s. The full story can be read on Bloomberg, in an article that looks at the journey of Xbox.
Recently, Microsoft also launched a digital museum. It’s pretty neat and includes a few things to look at, but the pride of the museum is a scan of the letter that followed Microsoft’s disastrous meeting with Nintendo.
The museum also allows you to log in to get a personalised museum curation.
That wraps up another month of weird news! Hopefully you enjoyed it, and have a good Christmas. Be sure to check out October’s weird news here if you haven't already, it seemed to have an overarching theme of dead things not being dead.
