So we’ve got a bit of welcome and pleasant news to report.

Those of you that regularly frequent our LAN center and ALSO use a microphone for either Ventrillo (or team chat, what have you) might be aware of the fact that several of the rear audio/mic ports on our machines are rather finicky. Some seem to have an intermittent short, while one is presumably picking up some random frequency, constantly broadcasting static over the mic whether or not a microphone is even plugged in!

Sadly, this issue wasn’t one of our highest priorities as not that many of our patrons regularly even use the microphones, and the resolution would involve spending some cash we could sooner put into some other projects we’d like to work on.

Thus swooped in Friday Night Frag Fest to the rescue!

Yesterday afternoon, two of the fragfellows dropped by with a pleasant surprise: sixteen (16) 6-channel PCI sound cards! Now, these certainly aren’t top of the line pieces of hardware – much to our appreciation, as we certainly don’t want anybody spending gazillions of dollars on lil’ old us – but they’re certainly on par (if not better) than our onboard sound, and there can be no disagreement that the friendly donation of sixteen sound cards is ABSOLUTELY an upgrade over onboard sound that ISN’T EVEN WORKING RIGHT.

So, when all is said and done, these guys single-handedly eliminated one of our more annoying and pervasive tech issues. Please, feel free to visit their site for more information about their LAN event, follow them on Twitter, or add yourself to their Facebook group. They’re among the store’s oldest friends and continue to support us.

Plus, you know, they’re throwing that LAN in June! Who wouldn’t want to keep up with that?

Happy holidays to all of our customers, however you may celebrate this time of year.

Game On! will close around 6 PM on Thursday December 24th so that we can all take a well-deserved break. We may re-open again Friday December 25th at 6PM but that is still under debate. We’ll tweet the results sometime before then so be on the lookout if that’s something you’re interested in.

In addition, we will be going as late as people want to stay on New Year’s Eve (December 31st) and opening again at around 6 PM on January 1st.

As always I would like to thank all the people who play in our LAN not just for hanging out but for being awesome company. Now that we’ve gotten to know some of you, it would feel lonely without.

Suggestions? Comments? Want to sound off on anything? Go HERE

A little belated–not as cutting edge as we might like–but we now have League of Legends installed on the computers in the LAN. The game itself strives to be better and bolder than DotA with vastly upgraded graphics and a slew of new items and heroes. Like Heroes of Newerth, it is entirely stand-alone and no longer relies of Warcraft 3 for its maps or characters.

The game has several characteristics that distinguish it from Defense of the Ancients. Every player is required to create a free account which then tracks their stats, friends lists, and various other information. Players, known in League of Legends world as Summoners, have a customizable talent tree, the ability to level as themselves (in addition to their Heroes leveling over the course of a match) and customize gameplay with various talents and runes.

In terms of game play, there are obvious similarities between LoL and games like DotA and HoN. It’s a single map with three paths, a.k.a. lanes, that players can take to reach the opponent’s base and eventually victory. What makes League of Legends unique however is the level of customization available to players (both for free and via collectors’ packs) and the matchmaking capabilities of the game.

To speak more of them, one has to address friends. With separate accounts for each player (absolutely free), users can add friends to their friends lists and chat with them through the LoL interface. This same list can be used to create matches where all friends are placed in a match on the same side (up to 5 people) and the matchmaking interface them pairs them up with other players of similar level and player count. In this fashion, friends can play together without the hassles inherent to Warcraft 3’s Battle Net.

So, the game is here and we welcome you to give it a try.

The employees here at Game On! are taking Sunday (the 23rd) off this week to celebrate some personal holidays. As always, we will return to our regularly-scheduled programming on Monday, August 24th at 10:00AM. So, enjoy this wonderful summer day and get out a little, smell the sunshine and bask in the roses?

In order to better facilitate conversation both about our store and gaming in general, we have added forums to this website, as provided by phpBB. A big thank you goes out to DWMagus, who did a lot of the coding and styling for both this site and the forums page. Please feel free to look around and report any any bugs or broken links to him.  We encourage conversation and discussion and hope to see all of you take full advantage of our forums.