This Week in Geekdom

Hi everyone. Hope you had wonderful holiday if you were among those celebrating Thanksgiving this past Thursday. Now with November nearly behind us, it's onward into the holiday crush. In fact, right after I finish publishing this I'm going to hang up all our decorations and start doing the math to see how much we'll need in the way of ingredients for this year's cookie-baking season. Woo spreadsheets! Ok, yes...I'm entirely too excited about that. Anyhow, decorations and math aside,...

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Gias Glance: Why Pre-Order Games? (Part 3)

This post is the third in a series examining why gamers should consider pre-ordering games. If you're just joining us now, you can find the first two parts in the series here and here respectively.                 Why Pre-Order?  So I Can Play it at Launch Most gamers agree that it is more fun to play a co-op game with friends than it is to play with random strangers or, depending on the game, alone. Being...

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Gias Glance: Why Pre-Order Games? (Part 2)

This series continues from the previous installment of Why Pre-Order Games? Why Pre-Order?  To Ensure I Get the Game Pre-orders originally came about because people found it hard to get items in stores due to their popularity. When talking about digital games, there is no lack of purchasing access since the digital nature of the game means that the stock is essentially unlimited. Occasionally, key resellers that give access to games on a different game distributor’s platform...

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Happy Thanksgiving!

We know it's not a holiday for everyone today, but we can all appreciate the notion of expressing gratitude for the wonderful things we experience. So our thanks go out to all of you: the game developers who are trying to make their passion projects a reality, the cosplayers bringing their fandoms to life, and, most of all our readers. None of this would be possible without you. Thank you for your continued support and we'll keep trying to bring you the best possible experience.  P.S....

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Gias Glance: Why Pre-Order Games? (Part 1)

There has been quite a bit of discussion (and yelling) regarding the practice of pre-ordering in the last few years, and the conversation seems to have gotten more intense as time has gone on. Some people are vehemently against pre-ordering while others do it for every new game that is announced. It is time that we, the gaming community, had an adult, honest, and rational discussion of the issues surrounding pre-ordering. It is important to have such a discussion, as gaming...

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This Week in Geekdom

Happy Sunday everyone and best wishes for a happy con to those trying to squeeze the last few minutes of awesome from BGGCon right now. The GIR and I are giving serious consideration to attending BGGCon in the near-ish future, perhaps as a substitute for Gen Con should the latter morph into an exorbitantly priced kerfuffle in 2015. One of the brilliant side effects of the Nerdaissance is that we're seeing new, innovative conventions pop up as others outgrow their infrastructure. Bringing...

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Cosplay: Who Wears The Pants?

Say what now? Costumes…in November? In all honesty, costumes have been all but shunted to the proverbial back burner for almost a month now. The combination of implementing the (hopefully) fun changes to the site, the approach of the holiday season, a deluge of new games, and a bit of delayed burnout from the marathon of costume construction this year has left me quite content to shelve the sewing machine and hot glue gun for a bit. I’m normally big into planning, so it was a bit of a...

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This Week in Geekdom

Hi guys, hope you're all having a great weekend so far. It's been a pretty big week on both the science front and the convention front, as we talked about a few days ago. I still can't get over the reality that is the Philae lander successfully touching down on comet 67P. It's arguably up there in the Literal Definitions of Mindblowing events. While we bask in the awe of humans pushing the envelope of technological possibility, we can also get down to the Week in Geekdom! TV/Movies Neil...

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Gias Games: Analogue: A Hate Story

Analogue: A Hate Story is a visual novel created by Christine Love. I played it on Steam. It spawned a sequel, Hate Plus.  I would not call Analogue: A Hate Story a game, it’s an interactive narrative. I won’t get into the whole game/not a game debate right now, but my definition of a game requires a failure state, and there is no way to fail with Analogue: A Hate Story. It’s a strong narrative in the form of an interactive computer terminal, so I feel “interactive narrative” is...

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