Maniacal Laughter Of The Damned

Zadzooks: Shadows of the Damned review

Take a journey to hell in Shadows of the Damned ( Electronic Arts and Grasshopper Manufacture, reviewed for Xbox 360, rated: Mature, $59.99) . This third-person, survival horror shooter celebrates the bloodiest of Grindhouse-style cinema .

Gamers have already heard this tale before. A hero must rescue his true love from a devil by visiting the Dark Lord’s home field.

In this case, players control Garcia Hotspur, a heavily tattooed, leather-clad demon hunter who is assisted in his adventures by a flaming skull with a British accent named Johnson.

Being a veteran of Dead Space, Bulletstorm, Mortal Kombat and Splatterhouse, most of the onscreen gore was not startling and, actually, pretty uninspired.

Head shots causing noggins to explode while torso’s bleed out, razor-bladed talons cutting through skin, appendages being blown off as the demons continue to crawl at the warrior, etc. Yes, “adults only” is the mantra.

It’s basically a Dante’s Inferno’s worth of demented imagery as a variety of hostile, rotting demons (reference a corpse spawner that spews demons until destroyed) greet the player.

As entrails pile up in hell and bodies hang around (literally), Hotspur explores villages ripped from the “Van Helsing” movie sets and runs into a lot of evil blackness that blankets the screen.

He’ll need to light up areas (just look for the goat’s head) and blast the black out of the demons to have a fighting chance of surviving.

However, I expected a bit more poetic macabre mayhem from Japanese game designers Shinji Mikami and Giochi Suda , known for their work on such titles as Resident Evil and the ultra-stylish No More Heroes.

Alas, the clever meter only really spiked for me when using Hotspur’s comrade’s many talents.

The little fellow transforms into a myriad of weapons as players unlock them. He can quickly turn from a simple torch into a sawed-off shotgun, a skull launcher and machine gun that spits out demon teeth.

I’ll also mention the maniacal level of dark humor and lame double entendre throughout.

For example, baby heads are doorknockers and must be fed strawberries or organs to open up. Or the player ponies up some cash in a vending machine to buy bottles of liquor to get tipsy and restore health.

Also, the developer offers a steady diet of sexually themed puns often tied to our pal Johnson (Beavis laugh to follow).

zoomboomzap: Small Motor: IT IS COMPLETED (queue maniacal laugh)

&Nbsp;yay. Down side is it has quite the no load draw at first it was around 6A but then it dropped to around 4A after a bit of breaking in. This high value is probably because some of slight bearing misalignment in addition to some tight lateral forces, they could really use some wave washers right now, currently their snap rings are up against the outer motor plate while the inner ring is on a lip on the stator. That combined with the fact that one of the bearings sustained some minor injuries in a bout of stubbornness and curiosity about how tightly you can fit a bearing in a hole before it dies. In aluminum this apparently occurs past the point when the aluminum is just barely flaking from being pushed out by the bearing and the bearing  almost won't rotate from all of the stresses/strains. That poor bearing's suffering will not go in vain for the limited amount of knowledge gained. All subsequent bearings I get my hands on should be thankful for its sacrifices to science /tangent. Here's a video of the motor working: After the assembly was completed with wires soldered and the shaft press fit and epoxied in place. All that was needed to finish up the assembly was shove the end plates on the the magnet can with the stator in the middle. Since the stator /rotor are in an unstable equilibrium its damn near impossible just to line up the screw holes without a jig by hand. I found that loosely screwing in one screw followed  by popping the whole motor in a vise with the shaft axis parallel to the vise jaws and the most displaced portion of the stator in plane with the vise jaws and then tightening them. This rotates everything about the screw until the end plates, stator and screw holes are pretty much concentric on their respective axes allowing everything to be screwed together yielding a sexy completed torque machine. More shenanigans regarding the state of this motor will be posted in the future.

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