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I have no idea what the state of UFO tourism is right now--especially since The X-Files stopped being the cultural phenomenon that it used to be back in the '90s--but Roswell, NM is still open for business. A friend of mine recently made a trip to this flying saucer mecca, and he's letting me post some of the pictures he took (as well as the postcard) of the UFO Museum in Roswell . Click below to see some pictures of this Atomic Age landmark, as well as photos from another UFO display in Erie, PA. Below are some pics of the museum's main attraction, extra-terrestrial visitors: What they are believed to look like, and how our government supposedly experimented on the remains of the dead aliens that crash-landed near Roswell decades ago. Thankfully, the museum does not feature any anatomically correct depictions of aliens probing humans. Below are two posters of the 1994 TV movie Roswell , which featured Kyle MacLachlan and Martin Sheen. Even though this film clocks in at an...

This week marks Universal's release of the three Jaws sequels ( Jaws 2 , Jaws 3D and Jaws: The Revenge ) on Blu-ray, meaning that die-hard sharksploitation fans can finally have a complete set of mechanical shark flicks--not CGI shark flicks--in high definition. Yet with most things Jaws-related, Universal is still late to its own party because Shark City Ozark started accepting pre-orders last March for latest and last entry in its "Ultimate Bruce" series : a 25-inch long maquette of the mechanical shark used in Revenge . As with the previous releases in this series, SCO's replica of the Revenge shark captures just about every detail of the fake fish used for the fourth and last Jaws movie. For those of you who know the history of this particular movie prop, the SCO maquette also includes details of when it wound up on display at the Universal Studios theme park in Orlando, Florida, complete with an unstitched belly and rusting blue steel display stand. Best of al...

As I've said before on this blog, I consider myself to be very fortunate to have lived through the early years of video games. I remember a time when the distribution cycle of a video game title would begin in coin-op arcades and continue through ports to PCs and home consoles. Now, the Internet, PCs, home consoles and portable media devices rule most of the video game world, while the few surviving coin-op arcades feature titles that will (probably) never appear in any other medium. The same is true about how the video games appear: Most current games are so beautifully designed that they largely sell themselves through clips of game play footage. Yet when video games had nothing but blocky graphics and clunky sounds to offer, they needed a little extra help to convince people to play them. In honor of the artwork produced during early years of video game advertising, Dynamite Entertainment is publishing The Art of Atari by Robert V. Conte and Tim Lapetino. According to the boo...

Even though I'm a tech-loving geek, I've been reluctant to accept cell phones and tablets as mediums with which to regularly play video games. I've used my cell phone in the past to play simple games to pass the time, but I couldn't imagine this kind of gaming to equal or surpass PCs and game consoles. Yet upon recent consideration, I've come to realize that what makes this form of gaming worthwhile is the kind of game that one chooses to play on a cell phone or a tablet. The kind of game that I'm talking about in this post is Monument Valley by Ustwo. Monument Valley is a touchscreen-based puzzle game that depicts the silent Princess Ida's exploration of a lost civilization's "sacred geometry" to discover its secrets. Players use the touchscreen to move Ida through each level and manipulate the many knobs and levers that are hidden within the isometric puzzles. Currently, the game consists of ten levels with an extra level called "Ida...

Because I'm a video gaming geek, I think I'm very fortunate to have been born at a time when I could witness video gaming during its earliest days (e.g., the early generations of home gaming consoles, early video game magazines, coin-op arcades in shopping malls everywhere, etc.) and its subsequent evolution into what it has become today. While so many more changes are waiting on the horizon, here is my list of five things that I hope remain consistent in future generations of video game systems and titles. Read on ... Before I get to the list, here's a little bit about my personal gaming background. My first game console was the Atari 2600, followed by the Atari 7800 and the Sega Master System. I mostly tuned out of gaming during the '90s, but got back into home consoles when I picked up Nintendo's GameCube back in 2003. This was followed by Nintendo's Wii and Wii U, which is my current console of choice. As you can see from my list, my opinions have been stron...