Free Valentine’s Day Cards for Gamers
It’s that time of year again. Love is in the air, suicide rates are spiking, and businesses everywhere are lying and trying to take advantage of you. Some companies are spending millions in television advertising to convince you that buying pajamas on the internet will get you laid. Or perhaps the woman you desire will finally surrender to you once she sees that you’ve bought her a teddy bear that cost more than the Prestige Edition of Modern Warfare 2? What about diamonds, or the boxes of chocolates where you only end up getting one or two bites of the one you really like? Maybe a really expensive, super-special arrangement of flowers from that guy with the commercials who gives off the distinct impression he might be considering marriage someday in the state where they make the pricey teddy bears? That’s not likely to do it either.
The brutal truth is that the only people guaranteed to be stimulated this evening are the flower shop owners and Hallmark store managers. Plus, in the opinion of this aging writer, if you’re having to pay for it you’re with the type of chick you might as well try and get the money back from once she’s refilled your health meter. Instead you need to keep your Modern Warfare 2 NVGs turned on and eyes peeled for the type of girl that cares more about a players Mana then his gold. A woman who’ll start an Army of Two with you and always give her all playing Co-op even when you’re wounded and it looks like you won’t have ammo enough to make it to the next save checkpoint.
They are hard to spot and even harder to convince to join your party. After all, if your a hardcore gamer reading this then evolutionary psychology has your desirability level just above someone in high school band, and just below chess club members (who tend to go on to having higher average incomes).
But don’t despair – I’m proof that even the biggest nerds can end up with amazing women. (Happy Valentine’s Day, Noelle. I love you and thanks for all your patience and support.)
Until you find a really good co-op player yourself, save your money! Rather then fattening up Hallmark by surrendering $5 for a sappy poem in a piece of folded construction paper, print and cut out the handy Valentine’s cards we’ve provided. You’ll know she’s a keeper if she’s impressed by how frugal you are and gets the gaming jokes. Heck, if she turns out not to be “the one”, there’s still a good chance she’ll appreciate even a poor Gamer just needs to get his health gauge refilled sometimes.
(Originally created for a previous year, some might have lost a little of their relevance over time. Art by the amazing Chris McGuire.)
Happy Thanksgiving Gamers!
You’d have to be living under a rock not to know that it’s Turkey Day today, and you’d have to be a bit of an ass not to pause for a moment and give thanks – be it to God, Buddha, the Big Banger, your employer, Uncle Sam, friends, some persecuted pilgrims and naive natives, Satoru Iwata, indoor plumbing, or your family – for something. If you’re an American reading this blog and you only get to play on an old hand-me-down NES instead of the PS3 you’ve been coveting, or even if you do your gaming in a cardboard box under an overpass with an old Tiger Telematics handheld, you still live in the best nation on this earth with resources and providence enough to help other countries, and in the age of the microprocessor and modern medicine.
As for us, besides soapboxes and industry executives prone to putting their foot in their mouth, we’re thankful for inspired developers and loyal readers. If you’ve been with us for a while you might have seen us pop up out of nowhere with an incredibly unique web portal that rivaled the big guys, and then may have noticed as we were forced to surrender to the blog format in response to a challenging economy. During that shift we lost a lot of good men and women who were talented professionals and good friends*, many of whom personally sacrificed and stuck with us far longer than would ever be expected. We are thankful for them and the groundwork they laid that brought us to your attention and still helps to make it easier for our skeleton crew to bring you our unique brand of news and perspective.
Unfortunately the measures taken to heal the economy haven’t been very successful and neither have our inexperienced attempts to effectively monetize our traffic. Even though the remaining staff are writers (all career gaming journalists) we are now spending more and more time worrying about keeping the lights on and things like Google AdSense policy, SEO (search engine optimization), code, ad delivery platforms, hacker exploits, and wrestling with the idea of affiliate marketing. It’s a situation you might have observed by how often we’ve been able to post new articles. We’d much rather leave things like that to experts while we focus on keeping you informed, laughing, and thinking.
So if you feel like helping out in any area and have any ideas, talents, or time you’d be willing to invest, that’s something we’d be thankful for too. (You can reach us here.) In the meantime we’ll keep doing our best to make GameAlmighty (and her sister sites, InfoAddict and TechAlmighty) a place you look forward to visiting – and sharing articles from, and clicking on the ads, and telling your friends about.
Now go and kick your cousins’ ass at some splitscreen before you get called in to the kitchen to help fist the dead bird full of StoveTop or peel orange potatoes.
*It’s foolish to try and name names because I am bound to forget a few and misspell others, but Captain Almighty (yes, he is still around and likes to interfere intervene regularly) wanted to make sure that I tried anyway…
Many thanks and Happy Thanksgiving to Edward Allebest, Chris Jensen, Mike Siciliano, Matt Butrovich, Kirk Manley, the compassionate wizards at CastIron Coding, Diane Valdivia, Noelle Allebest, Kylie Kiric, Daniel Espinosa, Vy Le, Sam Solars, Chris McGuire, Matthew Morrison, Chaz Head, Luis Villarreal, Tim Graybill, Trent Kamerman & 800Kamerman, Trina Williams, Keren Kang, Phil Radke, Cheryl Cajucom, Leath Robinson, David Chapman, everyone at Reverb, Tracy Erickson, Kerry Kullbach, Kimberly Henderson, Ben Smith, Randy Saunders, Marc Gutierrez, Nick Balogh, Joe Galath, BrianHarvey, Erik Allebest, Jacob B., Eric Zapp, Jeremy Merrick, Cheryl Cajucom, Shawnee Swarengin, Joe Pasco, Humphrey Cheung, Jon Lenaway, Neil Wood, Tiffany Massey, Pamela McKraken, Joey Kelly, Joel Masters, Anthony Romero, David Bruno, and Davit Barbakadze. We appreciate all you have done to support us and cheer us on in your various roles and capacities.
It’s not a good thing, but lately we’ve been so busy that we haven’t been very consistent about making it to our inboxes before the end of the day. However, if you would like us to link to your portfolio online, you have a suggestion for our perdicament, or you just want to say “Hi”, please be patient and persistent. We would love to hear how you’re doing.
Chaos, Help, and Gratitude
Attempted burglary, moving, food poisoning, back injuries, a grease fire, stalking, and even an invasion of hyper-aggressive rats have all conspired to make the last couple weeks some of the most chaotic and tumultuous in GameAlmighty’s history. They have also lead to a few days without posts. And were it not for the heroic efforts of Chris Jensen and outstanding push by Mike Siciliano, we would have had nothing up at all. So a big public thanks to both of them. Mike in particular really went the extra mile and even without the amazing collection of catastrophes he helped to cover on, the rest of the staff here can’t say enough good about the guy.
So in my book they’re both Super Heroes and we’re lucky to have them here fighting with us as part of the Almighty Alliance.
After the events of the last couple weeks however, some of the staff here have been trying to convince me that we need more help. And they’re probably right. So if you are interested in contributing and getting some of your writing and analysis of the video game industry some legitimate exposure, let me know. You can reach me through my personal twitter page -http://twitter.com/captainalmighty - or by way of one of our site’s contact page.
Oh, look - they even provided me with fancy graphic regarding the whole thing featuring yours truly…
Once again, a big “Almighty” thanks to Chris & Mike, and I look forward to hearing from those of you who are interested in playing a role in the industry and here on the site.
Sincerely,
Captain Almighty
Jack Kirby Estate Sues Everyone, Claims Ownership of Every Major Marvel Character
Jack Kirby co-created countless characters for Marvel, including the Fantastic Four, X-Men, Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Captain America, Avengers, etc. His estate has sent out 45 notices of copyright infringement to such companies as Marvel Entertainment, Disney, Paramount, Sony and others, insisting they intended to own the full copyright for every character by 2014. This could be a major problem for Disney, who recently purchased Marvel.
Under copyright law, the author or his heirs can begin a process to regain copyrights a certain period of years after the original grant. If Mr. Kirby’s four children were to gain the copyright to a co-created character, they might become entitled to a share of profits from films or other properties using it. They might also find themselves able to sell rights to certain characters independently of Marvel, Disney, or the various studios that have licensed the Marvel properties for their hit films.
In July, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled that Warner Brothers and its DC Comics unit had not violated rights of the Siegel heirs in handling internal transactions related to Superman, but an earlier ruling had already granted the heirs a return of their share in the copyright. In the late 1990s, Mr. Toberoff represented a television writer, Gilbert Ralston, who sued Warner over the rights to the film “Wild, Wild West.” The suit was ultimately settled.
Copyright issues have become increasingly difficult for Hollywood, as it continues to trade on characters and stories that were created decades ago, but are now subject to deadlines and expiration dates under federal copyright law.
[Editor's Note: It's both interesting and sad to see how litigious the comic book industry is. In order to stay in business and to only spend tens of thousands of dollars defending ourselves rather than the necessary millions (???), by agreement we aren't allowed to discuss the matter's details, but we have been under legal threats and attacks ourselves in the recent past. Who with, you wonder? What about? Well what do you think of the cool fictional photoshop work below? Neat, huh? Yeah, child's college fund and an entire retirement savings worth of "neat". It's quite inspiring illuminating to see super-heroes® in action first-hand.]
Top 10 Best Selling Games
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