Attaching special bonuses to an upcoming release, serving as a magical enticement to get you to fork over cash before a title comes out, is not a new practice– nor is it reserved to the gaming industry. I'm personally well familiar with receiving all sorts of solicitations for buying a CD before its release date, from bonus songs to videos to promo concert codes. With games, bonuses come specific to the retailer you're purchasing from too, with GameStop in particular usually running away with the lion's share of consumer "gifts."

Wherein one guy with a free weekend sets about using VirtualBox as a cross-platform, all-in-one webhost solution in order to do local website development whether connected to the internet or not. Warning: nerd content within.

As I have mentioned before, this site used to be part of extensive archives going back to 2000. Although largely I'm happy with my decision to excise the old archives, from time to time I lament the removal of some entries that I've written in the past which I particularly enjoyed.

While MMOGs originally started out as huge social experiences over time they were refined further and further into single player escapades that had multiplayer components thrown in here and there liberally, to the point that now the preferred method of progression is to just play the game alone. Most games these days heavily cater to that, requiring very little in the way of group activity as you level– you can get through the entirety of World of Warcraft, for example, solo, and any group quests or instance runs are completely optional. However, once you hit the level cap, the expectations of the game shift radically from solo-friendly to heavily dependent on raiding. For the solo player it's a startling change of perspective as the rug is pulled out underneath you, and for those players who don't want to raid the only content they have left comes down to recycling daily quests over and over, PvP arenas/battlegrounds, or chasing after vanity achievements.

Yesterday both Joystiq and Kotaku covered the release of a new academically-approved public survey soliciting opinions from LGBT and heterosexual gamers about what they look for in video games. The survey itself didn't impress me much, personally, but it's a good jumping-off point to examine the sort of outrage anything like this generates in heterosexual-dominated gaming circles.

Somewhere around the third or forth character I created in Champions Online I realized I just really didn't care about the Qularr invasion. There I was bouncing about with super powers in a gorgeous environment, but although the landscape was visually engrossing, try as I might I couldn't get attached to the conflicts on any [...]

The screenshot you see here (click it for a larger version) represents the first two seconds of global chat when I logged into my poor abandoned Asmodian priest yesterday in an attempt to finally ascend him past level 10. The wall of gold spam that hit me as soon as I signed in was the [...]