One of the artists over at Splash Damage has painstakingly crafted the Resistance's Gerund rifle from Bethesda's Brink. Having started off with the stock Nerf Stampede ECS18, which artist Laurens Corjin purchased for ~$30, he saw potential for a working replica of the Brink Gerund (granted, of course, not quite as deadly as the original... we hope).

Nearly every child that had to suffer through an otherwise unbearable school session can recall the numerous, embattled stick figures that they had drawn as the school hours droned on -- or, at least, I can. TikGames attempts to pull from these simplistic-yet-innovative concepts that were initially born out of our boredom; in their upcoming PSP game, Stick Man Rescue, players will attempt to save stickmen from horrible deaths involving our favorite stick-murder mechanisms: fire, acid pits, enemy stickmen, electrical doom, explosions, and other equally-deadly alternatives.

The very structure of video gaming technology, software development lifecycles, compatibility analyses, and nuclear fission have been propelled to previously-unimaginable heights as a result of a single, pioneering video game: The Oregon Trail.

Damn it, Dot!

I can hear some of you fancy physicists complaining already -- "nuclear fission?!" -- yes, it's a thing, physicist, look it up. That said, Oregon Trail may very well be the root of modern technological innovation and, additionally, can be widely attributed to the lack of dysentery in today's world—have you had dysentery lately?—there's a reason why not.

Indie game developer Vivec Entertainment has recently put forth a gore-filled, scary-music-enhanced teaser trailer of their upcoming Shadow of a Soul survival-horror trilogy. Shadow of a Soul is centered on an otherwise nondescript corporate spy that has been dispatched to, uh, find a competitor's blueprints for a non-disclosed project. Of course, none of that goes to plan. It never does, otherwise you wouldn't be reading about a horror game (granted, the mere hint of corporatism is quite terrifying in its own right).

This news is a bit extra-technological, but related heavily with gamers and gaming nonetheless (especially with Notch's recent separation from Minecraft): many of us started on Legos, and apparently, so did the guys behind Minecraft over at Mojang. Mojang posted on a popular Lego idea sharing website that it is interested in collecting ideas from the user-base about a potential Minecraft Lego set. Mojang's official post stated the following:

Builder/Image credited to Michael Thomas.