While I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions for myself, it’s hard not to feel the pull of “new year, new me!” every time we finish our midnight celebrations. More often than not, this is accompanied by an urge to clean and purge certain areas of my home in an effort to feel like I’m starting fresh. This desire often extends to my personal computer as well, since I spend large amounts of time on it for my various hobbies and work endeavors. I have said it...
CES 2022 starts today, but we've already heard some major announcements from some big players in the tech game earlier this week. Samsung, for example, debuted its new TVs, and some of them will let you play games from the cloud, no console required! The platforms they've integrated into their televisions so far are Google Stadia, Nvidia GeForce Now, and Utomik. According to Samsung, "select" 2022 TV models will give you direct access to GeForce Now, Stadia, and Utomik cloud gaming services v...
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 -...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
The weather in Michigan has started to turn colder, though for the time being we've dodged any real abundance of snow (I know, I know - I just cursed us). As we enter into the holiday season, I find it impossible not to reflect a bit on how fortunate I am to have become friends and share so many experiences with my inredible colleagues at Stardock. The last two-ish years have been a bit strange, to say the very least. The pandemic forced us all into remote work and kept us from seeing each ot...
Today, in cool things I found out about but definitely can't justify the cost of: Disney's Star Wars experience will offer lightsaber training. When Disney first announced their fully immersive Star Wars experience, I expected it would be expensive...but the cost was revealed to be around $6,000 for a family of four for just two nights, so it exceeded my expectations but quite a bit there. Still, it's fun to dream about, because as more details emerge it just keeps sounding cooler an...
The Internet can sometimes be a cesspit of vitriol and negativity, but no matter how gross it can get there's always something that manages to shine through the murk. This story from Kotaku a couple of weeks ago about a couple who put out an ad on Craigslist asking for someone to help them beat The Last of Us 2 is definitely one of those things. Karen and Bruce Klein retired and took an interest in video games in 2021 after looking into things that they could do to keep themselves active. T...
Ages ago, I recall Valve having announced their Steam Deck console. They released some more details about the hand-held device last week during a Steamworks Virtual Conference, and it appears that the hype may well be worth something. Global supply chain issues have seen the device delayed until at least February of 2022, but fortunately that's only just a little bit longer to wait past the original promised release date, which was December 2021. The specs for the Steam Deck have been out ...
I have long known that I work with plenty of people who love games - that's not news to me, and if you've been reading these blogs at all, it isn't to you either! What did surprise me, however, was just how many of my colleagues actually love Dungeons & Dragons and other table-top RPGs. About two months ago, we were coming off the high of having a fantastic in-person game night . Raeann - a member of our amazing operations team - said in one of our chats "Stardock D&D night, when?", ...
There are a lot of things that I love in this world, but here are two of them that are relevant to today's topic of conversation: Theater, and creative solutions. With a large portion of theaters around the world are still closed or under lots of restrictions due to the pandemic, some actors have turned to the internet and Fallout 76 for an answer to the problem. The Theater Company , a Fallout 76 acting troupe, has been holding performances in order to keep their acting skills sharp over th...