At the behest of irreverent gamers everywhere, Volition has revealed that they are planning on including the Ostrich Hammer as an actual unlockable weapon for the upcoming Red Faction: Guerrilla!

Kotaku reports on the announcement:

In what some are calling the winning video game ‘prank’ of April Fool’s Day 2009, Volition released a hilarious video on Wednesday revealing the Ostrich Hammer, a brilliant response to NeoGAF comments regarding an early batch of Red Faction: Guerrilla screenshots. Brimming with excellent comic timing and one of the best beards ever, the video caused many of our commentors to declare the game a day one buy, as long as the Ostrich Hammer was included. Volition is going to be holding you to that.

A wielded in-game Ostrich briefly takes flight

Now that is customer service.

Kotaku post is here. Volition post is here.

VeloNews has posted an article detailing the equipment that endurance racer Jeff Oatley used on his most recent 350 mile Iditarod Trail Invitational race. Most prominently featured is his titanium frame Speedway Cycles Fatback snow bike, designed in Alaska and uniquely configured with a 165mm rear hub (vs the 135mm standard for mountain bikes) to provide chain clearance for the 80mm wide rims and 3.7″ wide tires.

Jeff Oatley breaks trail the hard way, near Rainy Pass (Photo from VeloNews)

Jeff finished the 350 mile race in first place, but weather wreaked havoc on trail conditions. His time of five days, 19 hours, and 34 minutes was well behind the previous record, set several years back under colder (and relatively clear) conditions.

More information on the Iditarod Trail Invitation race can be found at the home page here. General race, gear and Alaska related discussion can also be found on the Alaska regional forum on MTBR.com or on AKSpokes.com.

Link to the VeloNews article is here.

If UPS had a fleet of vehicles like this stripped and tuned example, all deliveries would be same-day.

In addition to parcels, this UPS truck can also haul ass.

The full writeup can be found at Zerocustoms. Image is taken from the Autoblog post. Check the links out to see more pictures as well as video of the truck in action.

The chaps over at MadShrimps.be have put to test two identical laptops, each using an identical cloned drive image. One has a standard Hitachi laptop HDD (RPM not specified) and the other has an OCZ Vertex SSD. They’ve done the sensible thing and set them upon performing tasks simultaneously, making a video of each test suite available on YouTube. The difference is quite significant, but is it enough to offset the additional costs that a solid state disk demands? See for yourself!

Battle Royale!

The full details and exciting results can be found here!

Are you the prospective owner of a Bugatti Veyron, but the standard edition just seems too… plain? Spruce it up a bit by having one done up with actual gold paint.

A true Baller (Photo from Motor Authority)

More details on this rolling tribute to excessive opulence can be found at Motor Authority.

Everybody’s favorite portable video game machine, the Nintendo Game Boy, turns 20 years old this month.

Mmm... delicious. (Photo from Fizzy Katiepops' Flickr stream)

Though  many versions have since been released, the original Game Boy is still an iconic reminder of the origins of hand-held gaming. Though not the first, or the most powerful, the Game Boy popularized the market and went on to sell over one hundred million units (Game Boy and Game Boy Color).

A full article on the Game Boy’s 20th anniversary can be found at 1Up.

In what is likely the best thing to have graced the internet over the last few days, Volition, the folks behind Summoner, Descent: Freespace and the Red Faction series, have created a video which showcases their newest weapon – the Ostrich Hammer.

Hilarity Will Ensue

Kotaku posted a bit of background to set the stage for Volition’s surprisingly well done, Office-esque video clip. Criticism from forum dwellers on the quality (or lack thereof) of early leaked screenshots for the upcoming Red Faction 3 led to teasing Photoshop hijinks. But in a way, the questionable quality of the screenshot is now directly responsible for the brilliance of potentially being able to kill your enemies with a giant bird. Let’s hope they include it as a bonus unlockable.

Kotaku link is here.

According to Discovery News, a robot named Adam has managed to process and design a dozen new genes without outside assistance.

Adam actually discovered more than 12 new gene functions. When King and his colleagues compared the functions of all the genes Adam found, they realized that some of them had previously been described. So Adam had independently confirmed those results.

Adam is still a prototype, but King’s team hopes their next robot, Eve, will help boost the search for new drugs to combat diseases such as malaria.

'I've experiments to run, there is research to be done'

Let’s hope Adam and Eve (the successor) do not develop a taste for cake.

The article can be viewed here:

Google was also in the news for an entirely different reason today – as one of their street mapping vehicles was stopped by an angry group of residents while photographing the historic village of Broughton, England. Citing it as an invasion of their privacy, they moved to block the vehicle from driving through. There were no torches and pitchforks reported by The Daily Mail, but it’s quite possible some were present.

Two of the apparently disgruntled gentlemen in question (Image from The Daily Mail)

Read more here.

The fellows over at CNet lifted the veil on some of Google’s datacenter secrets, showing a bit of the magic behind what powers everybody’s favorite Non-Evil search engine. Their use of shipping containers as a modular datacenter is not new (Sun had sold the idea in years past, among others), but some of the clever engineering that goes into reducing power consumption and distributed power backup is quite interesting.

Google Data Center (Image from CNet)

Complete article can be found here.

Update 4/3/2009: Now with a video tour!