Begin transmission. We are beginning our orbit into the dark side of the moon. Radio silence will commence momentarily. This will be our last communication for a while, ground control.

As of Sunday, Britanny and I are heading down to Jamaica for a week on vacation. Comic strips are done and uploaded for the next couple of weeks, so those will update on their own as always. However there won’t be any new news posts until I get back.

So be good. You can have a couple of friends over while we’re away, but no parties. Don’t stay up too late, and don’t forget to clean your room.

I’m going to cram a bunch of information into this post so that it’s readily available while I’m away.

Digital Overload

• January 16th is the cut-off date for $45 registration (which includes a free t-shirt, and a chance to win 2GB of RAM from Crucial), after which the price of registration goes up.
• I’ll be on vacation until the 14th, so while I’m away your payments won’t be immediately credited to your account. Remain calm. As long as you’ve paid, and PayPal gives you a receipt, you’re all set. I’ll update all of the accounts as soon as I get back. So don’t freak out if you pay for your registration next week, and your Digital Overload account doesn’t show it right away.
• We’ve updated our Tabletop Gaming page. Aside from providing space for card gaming (Magic, etc) and miniature wargaming (Warhammer, Dark Age, etc), my friend Matt Daigle will be on hand again running demos all weekend for a variety of board games. There will also be a collection of over 60 board games available for you to grab and play at any time.
• Play-Asia has given us $500 in gift certificates to give away at the event, which I’ll be assigning to some of the tournaments. Also ZeStuff has donated a pile of prizes from video games to board games, which will be raffled off and awarded for tournaments. Stay tuned as we update our prize list in the weeks before the event.
• Unreal Tournament 2K4 and Dead or Alive 4 have been added to our tournaments list for this year.
• SUMO is sponsoring our console gaming section, with a bunch of really comfortable bean bag chairs. Additionally, the console section will feature a limited number of displays for attendees to hook up their consoles to. They will need to be shared amongst attendees, so we still recommend bringing your own tv/monitor/projector if you want total control over what’s being played.
• We have negotiated reduced rates at these hotels, for attendees. However to further break down the cost of travel and lodging, you might want to look into organizing a room/ride share.

Winter-een-mas

I’ve whipped up a cut-out crown for anyone that wants to wear their own King’s Crown this season. The front and back are in a single image, just print them out, cut them out and tape them together. If it isn’t big enough, there’s a generic extension piece on the second image that you can cut up and insert between the front/back pieces for extra… uhh… girth?

Last year for Winter-een-mas I celebrated by reminiscing about my fondest gaming memories, one game each day of the holiday (though I forgot to write one for the seventh day… whoops!). This year I’ve decided to hold a GameDay for a different game, on each day of the holiday. Some of the games allow more participants than others, but with one every day for seven days, hopefully most people who want to participate will be able to.

The tentative schedule is as follows:

• Thursday the 25th – Battlefield 2142 (PC) 7PM EST
• Friday the 26th – Rainbow Six: Vegas (360) 8PM EST
• Saturday the 27th – Dark Messiah of Might and Magic (PC) 4PM EST
• Sunday the 28th – Gears of War (360) 3PM EST
• Monday the 29th -Starcraft (PC) 6pm EST
• Tuesday the 30th – Crackdown Co-op Demo (360) 7PM
• Wednesday the 31st – Halo 2 (360) 8PM

Some of the games with lower participation caps (Gears of War, for instance, 8 people max per match) will need a workaround. I’m thinking of something like just a series of matches, and resetting at regular intervals to give new people a chance to get in.

The Crackdown demo coming out on the 18th has been confirmed as co-op (thanks for all the emails), so I thought it would be neat to throw it in there. Obviously this is a one-on-one sort of deal, but there must be only so much playability in the demo. So I figure I can schedule maybe 3 to 4 co-op play sessions that evening. I haven’t figured out how I’ll award those few slots for the playtime, but I imagine some sort of contest. Maybe coolest Winter-een-mas photo/costume or something like that.

I’ll sort out the details after I get back from vacation.

I think that that is about it for now. If I think of anything else before I leave, I’ll post below.

Have a great week everyone!