I’m man enough to admit that the clip above, provided courtesy of YouTube’s magical video delivery system (which must surely be powered by witchcraft), made me cry.

When I was a child, I watched the Transformers film. This was back in the day before spoilers and previews, so I really didn’t know what to expect. I remember watching on in horror and sorrow as Optimus Prime, the leader of my beloved Autobots, died. Like the light in Prime’s eyes, a little part of myself also died that day.

Optimus Prime was dead. I cried. I burst into tears, I openly wept, I wailed. To the young me, Optimus Prime was the very epitome of Hero. He was valiant, he was brave, he always had a useful moral message to give and, more importantly, he was a TRUCK that changed into a ROBOT. I recall being very sad and looking forlornly at my Optimus Prime toy, looking into the face of a dead, er… robot. The young me fared badly, but I pulled on through after a few bleak weeks.

I seriously don’t think that the makers of the Transformers movie realised what a profound effect the death of Prime had on millions of people. Did He-Man die? No. Lion-O? No. What if this had happened in a franchise of girls toys? Imagine the outrage if the lead pony (?) of My Little Pony was butchered and turned into glue. Mental scarring for life. But it didn’t happen, whereas the death of Prime did very much take place.

So when I stumbled across the clip above and watched it in it’s entirety, I did feel a twinge of sorrow. The memories came flooding back and I did, for a moment, feel quite sad. Seriously, they KILLED one of the great characters of 1980’s cartoons, and the repercussions of that are clearly still being felt by me now. However, I am glad to report that upon watching the clip, now, in 2008, my adult self didn’t cry.

Well, much. But it makes me vulnerable and sweet and lovely to admit it, right? It’s good that I’m in touch with my fragile, emotional side, right? Guys? Oh alright, let the mockery commence.

Incidentally, this is my first ’simulcast’ on both randomlinkage.com and teamteabag.com, so hello to everyone. I hope you can join me in my time of grief, or if not I hope you can humiliate me with amusing comments.

I love me some retro gaming on XBLA, I just think that there are some absolute stunners that should be cleaned off and given a second life on XBLA/PSN, and here is my personal top 10 games I want to see resurrected.

10. Desktop Tower Defense (PC)

One of the few flash games that has ever truly grabbed me, Desktop Tower Defense is a free to play game at Kongregate.com. The aim of the game is to build up a maze of different attack towers to filter the oncoming enemies into and hope the meet their doom before the get to the exit, very simple, very fun! The control system might be hard to port to a console, but hopefully they can find a way.

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Here we have the fastest police car ever designed.  Made by British supercar loons Caparo in conjunction with the Metropolitan Police Force, the T1-RRV is based on the original Caparo T1 (which has proven somewhat unreliable in tests) and is capable of 0-100mph in less than 5 seconds, boasts 575bhp and has a top speed over 200mph!  Of course, the car cannot cope with speed bumps, so would only be deployed on the M25 to catch people trying to speed away from the cops, and it has no passenger seat, so all they can do once they catch you is hold you at the roadside until more arrive to take you away.

Sadly, it is just a concept car and not likely to reach production…  But if it did, I wonder how many people would be signing up to join the Met?

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Most of us here at TTB are at the 24 Hours Of LeMans race this week, but don’t abandon us just yet, as we’ve got loads of exciting (but not so current) posts queued up for the enjoyment of all 3 of our regular readers. Most of the posts have a motor racing theme, too, because we’re like really clever and stuff.

First up, we have the 24 Hours Of LeMons, a 24 hour endurance race for cars that cost under $500. That means the cars have to be bought and race prepped for under £250(ish), but thankfully they don’t have to be road legal. There are 6 events this year, starting with LeMons SF on May 10-11 in, er, San Francisco, and ending with the awesomely-named Arse-Freeze-Apalooza on December 27-28.

In a particularly interesting twist, the race features “The People’s Curse Award”, where a car is chosen to be crushed during the race due to cheating or other douchebaggery. Also to prevent cheating, the organisers reserve the right to buy any car deemed to be worth over $500 from the participiants involved, for, of course, $500.

There are loads of pictures of past participants on the official page here, and some great pictures of a 2007 event in DiLow333’s Flickr set, where I got the above image from. More info is available on the 24 Hours Of LeMons site here.

Someone should bring this to Europe - sooner rather than later!

No, I’m not talking about ‘dress up’ in a kinky sort of way. Just because our Lords and Masters have upped and left for foreign climes doesn’t mean that we can all be silly. Calm yourselves down!

I am of course referring to the recent (well, March, it’s fairly recent right?) World Record set by 80 crazy folk in London. The Book of Guinness World Records contains many crazy feats of brilliance, but us ordinary folk are often left out. I can’t lift boulders or run a mile in a minute or whatever, I need something relevant. Lo and behold, the Guiness World Records Gamer’s Edition book, which contains more gaming-centric records and achievements, was born.

So what did these 80 people do? They dressed up as 80 games characters and stood on the Millennium Bridge, looking foolish. Looking foolish wasn’t part of the world record attempt, more an unfortunate consequence. The record was used to promote the Gamer’s edition book.

The image above is a mere snapshot of the greater picture. Here they are, all 80 of them, in their world record breaking glory. I’ll be honest, the majority of them look bobbins. Naff. Crap. I don’t recognise some of them, so I could be doing them a great disservice; let me know if I’ve belittled someones amazing outfit.

Special credit has to go to the chap on the left hand side of the picture, three people above Spyro the Dragon, who’s come dressed as Mario. Except he’s in pink, so either he’s Super Camp Mario or he’s Super Put The Washing Machine on the Wrong Setting Mario, I’m not sure which.

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It’s a little-known fact that us here at TTB are big motor racing fans - well, not that big, but we do enjoy a good excuse for a piss-up and a spot o’ camping, so most of us are off to the Le Mans 24 Hour Race this year. That means that it’ll be a bit quiet round these parts, although we do have some stuff queued up (a lot of it motorsport-and-gaming themed, you’ll see), and we do have Evoroth and Penge holding the fort for us.

Plus, we’re planning on having some internet access going on while we’re there… Does that really surprise anyone?

We’re taking a particularly big crew this year, with 15 of us in total, so I’m sure we’ll all be having lots of fun with cars, beers, and fireworks, while you’re all sitting at work. We’ll be thinking of you. Really.

So bon soir, mes chers lecteurs, and au revoir until a week tomorrow!

Stargate SG-1 fans, join me as I tremble in fear and ponder what this video truly means to the future of the human race - the replicators are here, and we created them.

These tiny robots were created by UK and European scientists and can join together to perform tasks such as searching collapsed buildings for survivors. Well, they don’t quite do that yet, but that’s the eventual plan. I suppose we can always rely on the fact that, as a British invention, these probably won’t actually work anyway.

CrunchGear, who are usually pretty reputable and reliable, have a story up with some supposed leaked info from a “friend at Microsoft” regarding an Xbox 360 with built-in Blu-Ray. Supposedly, they will try to upstage Apple by announcing it an hour before WWDC starts, at 9am PDT today. It’s also rumoured to be cheaper than the current Xbox 360 Elite.

Interesting stuff, and we only have a few hours to find out whether or not this is true. I’m erring on the side of caution, personally - especially as Robbie Bach, President of Entertainent & Devices at Microsoft, categorically denied it in a recent interview.

Way back in 1994 EA dropped Skitchin’ on an unsuspecting Megadrive market. For those that don’t know, skitching is the art of being pulled along by a car when wearing rollerblades or on a skateboard. The game was very much like the Road Rash games in both looks and gameplay, the difference being your on rollerblades and not a motorbike. The game largely slipped under the radar of most gamers at the time, as the concept was not the greatest, but the gameplay was as good as anything Road Rash had to offer.

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Well it’s been relatively quiet here at the ‘bag lately, partly due to Rock Band, partly due to us planning for holiday next week. But that has not stopped me gaming, so here’s a breakdown of whats kept me (in)sane for the last few weeks.

Ninja Gaiden 2 (Xbox 360)

I never played Ninja Gaiden Black on the original Xbox, it just didn’t seem like the kind of game I would enjoy, and I originally felt much the same about Ninja Gaiden 2. Yeah it looked slick with all the limb chopping and decapitation, but as my father always says ‘you can’t polish a turd’. But then I played Ninja Gaiden: Dragons Sword for the DS, and loved it, so when the demo for NG2 was released earlier this week I downloaded it just to see what the fuss was about, and I was astonished. Apart from the stunning graphics and gratuitous amount of blood, the gameplay is smooth and the control system beautifully simple. The sticking point for most will be the difficulty. It is brutally tough, even on the easiest difficulty setting (of four!) I am having my ass handed to me regularly, and some of the later bosses are just ridiculous! But that doesn’t bother me, in fact I’m relishing the challenge compared to a lot of newer games that seem far too easy… I would seriously recommend everybody download the demo and check this game out for themselves! Truly Epic!

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Yep, it seems that The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air is the new Rick Astley.

Is it video week here or something?

Here’s a short film produced by the Blender foundation, to show off the capabilities of the open source 3D animation package of the same name. Yes, this was entirely produced on free software - not only is the source code available so animators can tweak and change and add any features they like, but Blender costs absolutely nothing.

I bet the big-time commerical 3D animation peeps like the makers of Maya, After Effects, and 3D Studio Max are feeling a little nervous after seeing what this software is capable of.

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Omigod omigod omigod! DNF is indeed real, or so it seems, as some guy called Jake Hall shows us in this video. Yes, he’s a douchebag, and yes, you’ll have to skip the first 4 minutes to see those 20 seconds of gaming gold, but it’s real, it’s looking really nice, and it’s in this very video right here.

Shake it baby!

This LEGO F-14 Tomcat has working swinging wings, landing gear, brakes, and a hell of a lot more. It’s so impressive, in fact, that it won its creator, a Dane going by the name of Jereon Ottens, a job designing Technic models for LEGO themselves. Here’s a list of bits on bobs on it that are actually working, powered either by electric motors or pneumatic witchcraft:

• Canopy
• Cannon
• Swing wings
• Landing gear
• Landing gear bay doors
• Steering of front wheel
• 2 Engines
• Brakes (main fuselage+wings)
• Arrester hook
• Flaps (front & aft on main wings)
• Glove vanes
• Air Intake Control System doors
• Main landing gear lock

More pics!

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Judging by the popularity of our post about Rock Band instrument skins, there’s a prettty big market out there for personalised musical-themed game controllers. So I was impressed when I discovered an Etsy seller known as BlackStarDesigns, who will paint up your Guitar Hero or Rock Band controller with a totally awesome design (like the one pictured above) for just $30. They’ll paint anything you like on your little plastic axe, and have done everything from video game art to sports team logos.

Shame we’re not in the US, or us here at TTB would probably all be rockin’ out with custom Team Teabag guitars some time pretty soon. I guess we’ll have to settle for our other excellent merchandise for now.

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According to BoingBoing, this video’s actually supposed to be a bit gay. But really, it isn’t. It’s just hilarious and very well done. Yay for not-gayness!

News has just surfaced that Planet Rock, the only station bar 6 Music that is actually worth listening to on DAB radio in the UK, has been saved from imminent closure. The multiple Sony Award winning station has been purchased by a consortium of rock stars who have shows on the station, Tony Iommi (Black Sabbath), Gary Moore (Solo/Thin Lizzy), Ian Anderson (Jethro Tull) and Fish (Solo/Marillion), and headed up by long time rock fan Malcolm Bluemel.

Planet Rock had been in trouble ever since original owners, GCap Media, announced it was selling Planet Rock and it’s sister station The Jazz due to the company’s poor financial state. It was originally going to stop broadcasting on 31st March, but due to interest from multiple groups, including one headed by Queen guitarist Brian May, the station got a stay of execution and remained on the air. None of these bids amounted to a sale until 31st May, when the new owners completed the purchase for an undisclosed sum. It was also announced that there will be no breaks in transmission or changes in programming.

For all our non-UK readers, you can also listen to Planet Rock on the web via PlanetRock.com.

Full press release after the break.

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In my expert opinion, Wayne’s World is almost definitely one of the best films ever made. Hell, if it weren’t for the existence of Back To The Future and Team America, Wayne’s World 1 and 2 would be the best creations to ever hit the silver screen - and yes, I am mental.

So it was excellent to see Mike Myers and Dana Carvey get back into their old roles for the MTV Movie Awards, even if they’re probably far too old 14 years on.

Does this mean that there could be a Wayne’s World 3? I really, really hope to God that they don’t.

Schwing!

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D’oh! Perhaps I should’ve thought of this excellent idea and done it before Joystiq did. I’m pretty sure that between us, myself and OwningXylophone have got pretty much every single XBLA game, especially the really crappy ones.

You see, they’ve gone through and played every single one of those potential deletion candidates (which we listed a while back) and posted them up in a nice gallery, with mini-reviews for each.

Their verdict on most of them - actually, they’re not all that bad.

So it seems that Crytek, developer of the system breaking FPS Crysis, may be ending support for the title before the current bugs fixed. In a statement made as part of their monthly update, the devs confirmed a few things that will make fans of the game none too happy:-

“At this time, there almost certainly will not be a patch 1.3 delivered for Crysis.”

And with regards to a dedicated Linux server for the game:-

“We are sorry to say that the current development progress is not satisfying enough, as we have a hard time getting the code to a state where it is stable and playable. Thus we made the decision to put the development on hold for now”

No solid reasons have been given for these decisions, only a ‘watch this space’ message…

This is a shame, as I was half tempted by this game, but after reading up on all the problems the game still has in its 1.2 guise, in both single and multiplayer modes, I think I’ll give it a miss.