When you think about objects that you can invest in for hopefully high returns, you tend to think of things like gold, jewelry, art, antiques, and so on. A new study from the economists at the Higher School of Economics in Russia recently released a study that presents a new and unique lucrative alternative: Lego sets. Throughout the course of their study, the economists discovered that the market prices of the retired Lego sets sold on the secondary market grow by at least 11% annually,...
A cube-shaped object has been spotted by scientists working on China's Chang'e 4 mission on the far side of the Moon. Pictured below, you can see the object standing out against the blackness of space, practically begging in the Yutu 2 rover to come over and examine it. While the object is probably something like a displaced boulder, scientists want to complete their due diligence and fully intend to send the Yutu 2 over to investigate. Our Space, a Chinese language science outreac...
As a general rule, most everyone thinks of Pong as the first actual video game (it isn’t technically , but it was the first one commercially available).We’ve come a long, long way since then - both visually and technically. I have grown up on video games, starting back in the 1980’s with Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers. At the time, I don’t recall being particularly enamored with the graphics of even the technological marvel that it was for its time...
The mosaic (left) and geographic (right) maps of Jupiter's moon, Ganymede. Image courtesy of NASA. In case you haven't figured it out by now, we love space here at Stardock. While the premises for our games tend to be fictional, we do our best in many cases to try and adhere to real-world science, and that includes referencing and showcasing planets that actually exist in our solar system. In Star Control: Origins, for example, you start in our solar system. All of the planets...
Supergiant’s Hades made history earlier this week by becoming the first video game to ever win a Hugo Award. Awarded annually, the Hugo Award is a prestigious literary award presented to the best science fiction or fantasy works for the previous year. Typically, this is reserved for works like novels or short stories, but a newly added video game category for 2021 gave Hades an opportunity for recognition. The game was up against others in the science fiction and fan...
When it comes to teaching a person how to play a video game, there have been two extremes over time that have been prevalent in gaming: “too much hand-holding”, and “throw you to the wolves and see how many times you get shredded alive.” Earlier video games - long before gaming became a mainstream hobby for millions of people - typically skewed toward the latter category. Old school NES games would drop you right into a situation with no explanation of how to play -...
I love open exploration. This fact is actually relatively newfound information for me. I have always enjoyed RPGs and the “exploration” they offer - by that, I always meant whatever new world tidbit or experience I had as I progressed through a linear storyline. But as open world exploration started to permeate several different game genres, I found myself finally at a place where open-world sandbox and RPG intersected: Skyrim. As far as my immediate recollectio...