This is pretty exciting news for us.

For a number of logistical reasons and one financial reason (not enough financial, basically) , we haven’t yet been able to pick up Modern Warfare 3 for the LAN. Don’t get us wrong, we’d very much like to, but the stars are all wonky and misaligned for the time being. The cool side of some of that unfortunate circumstance is actually what Brian’s working on for how we store games on the PCs. Once he’s got that all figured out, we’re probably going to FLIP OUT and GO NUTS and install a whole mess of free-to-play games as well as other titles of interest that we’re able to afford/acquire.

(Also, what he’s doing is pretty cool, and – if he’s up to it – there’ll be a post explaining the sheer amazing of his and Anna’s hard work.)

All of that stuff aside, even during this storage solution transitionary period there’s enough space on more than half of the PCs for us to install MW3 and take advantage of this upcoming free weekend. We know that some of you have really been wanting to try it out or simply play it here at Game On!, and it bums us out that we haven’t yet been able to provide.

So, for this weekend at least, Modern Warfare 3 will be available for play in the LAN (hours still cost, of course). Hopefully we’ll learn a few technical/logistic tidbits to assuage our concerns in those departments, and really put us into gear for getting MW3 in here permanently as soon as possible.

(For those of you interested in Battlefield 3, rest assured we’re looking into that as well.)

Keep your eyes peeled to our Facebook and Twitter (and this post), because we might couple a promotion for free time with this whole shebang.

Love always,
Game On!

There is trivia as yet unanswered.

There are prizes as yet ungiven.

And, of course, scores that remain unsettled.

Due to compromising circumstances, some stuff from the anniversary just didn’t get done. We think it’s a shame that effort was put forth and prizes gifted in good faith what never saw the light of day. To that end, why not see everything all squared away at an after-party?

A two-months-later, on-a-weekday-for-some-reason, not-really-at-all-like-an-after-party after-party!

Short and simple, we’ll be picking up some of the loose ends as well as sweetening the tasty with a nice competitive bonus. You see, we’ll be joining in on some of the evenings contest festivities.

Let’s break it all down. The events will be handled logistically pretty much exactly as they would have been at the anniversary proper. Who’s up for some copypasta?

We’ve only had him a few times (and would love to have him more~), but Taylor has sufficiently demonstrated that he is a quizmaster PRO. With a format that’ll put you in stitches and questions that’ll really wrinkle your brain and try your chops, you can be sure that Taylor’s trivia event is NOT TO BE MISSED.

(Also, we hope he has a better name for it than this terrible one we came up with.)

You’ll work in teams of (up to) four to answer questions and then you’ll receive points and then people with more points than other peoples’ points will win the whole thing!

Prizes:
1st place team – $50 gift certificate to ThinkGeek (for each team member)
2nd place team – Four pre-chosen faux-retro carts from 72pins.com (entire team)
3rd place team – Sixteen packs of collectible Lego minifigures (entire team)
“Beat GO! Up” bonus – 10 LAN hours to each member of 1st place team – if their score beats ours

Folks who attended our first year’s anniversary might remember the crazy, out-of-the-blue, sleeper hit that was Crossfire. Somehow the nostalgia and the energy and the spectator sport of it all came together in such a way to make it.. well, pretty much the greatest thing ever. Last year, timecrunch prevented us from including Hungry Hungry Hippos (the spiritual successor), so we decided to make it up to both games by escalating things a touch and including that much more. This will be a several game marathon that sees opponents eliminated at each stage, culminating in a tense mystery game showdown.

Prizes:
1st – First pick of two of the following four games (donated by The Wizard’s Chest)
2nd – Second pick of one game
3rd – Last remaining game

• Cir*kis
• Uno 40th anniversary edition
• Cathedral
• electronic Sudoku

This one’s new. Basically, each member of the GO! brood is going to choose an event at which they feel they excel. No tournaments, no brackets. Just a whole mess of 1v1 for anybody that’s willing to step up and play. Each person that challenges us at our chosen event and WINS will receive four (4) free LAN hours.

Damon – Tetris Attack (SNES)
Brian – Undecided
Anna – Undecided

Date: Wednesday, February 1st
Time: 6:00 P.M. – Midnight (or so)
Cost: FREE
Food: Depends on attendance
Specials: 8 hours for $10 / $10 t-shirts

All in all, this should be a fun and chill weekday event. Free gaming and hangouts, plenty of prizes, and lots of love.

See you there! (R.S.V.P. on Facebook)

Love always,
Game On!

We hope that you’ve been enjoying the holiday season, be your interests religious, spiritual, commercial, social, or homicidal.

Well, a new pricing system was promised and new pricing system shall you receive. Allow us to tell you about it:

(Individually break down to $3 for one hour, $10 for four hours, and $20 for ten.)

These prices are pretty much comparable to our current membership prices, but also allow more for all of the hour quantities in-between the ones mentioned. Rather than our previous system of predetermined set quantities at set price points, we’ve tried to simplify in a way that will just let you buy as many hours as you want, and the number of hours you want to purchase just determines how much you pay for each one.

This will also make much easier those occasions when people purchase [x]-many hours and then end up sticking around longer than they originally thought. At that point, you can just pick up where you left off that day and add additional hours at your previous rate.

So, on the whole, hours cost less than they used to, start a bit cheaper, and are much more available for convenient on-the-fly pricing. Naturally, we stand by our NON-EXPIRY standard for normal pricing, which means that you can buy as many or as few hours as you like and they WILL NOT DEPLETE until you actively log in and use them.

Moving right along, we’d still very much like to keep the idea of bulk pricing but at a slimmer price:

This is basically one big lump of LAN time and not a “this-many-hours-and-up” price point. Those who used to purchase our bulk hours will find it comparable to/cheaper than the hourly rate of most of our current bulk prices, only without requiring that you drop anywhere between $55-80 a pop to take advantage of it.

Due to the overall drops in pricing, day passes are also getting a bit of a nip and tuck:

Once our new pricing goes live, we’ll have a sexy little chart on the LAN rates page making apparent the value of the day passes (e.g. how much you save versus non-expiry hours, what the cost would be in those terms, what time of day the pass is no longer a better deal, etc.). Also, in the case of Monday and Wednesday, their pricing is based more on an idea of daily specials that we’ll soon be implementing, as well as the possibility that we’ll be opening later on those days at some point in the future.

(We did keep in mind that some of you guys really liked the “$10 weekday passes” and “12 hours for $20″ promotions we’ve been running this month, which is why we really tried to keep some things as close to that as possible.)

Bear with us, folks, this is a healthy piece of real estate that we’re paying for each and every month, and utilities sure ain’t cheap either. Combine that with investing in games, licenses, hardware, and normal wear-and-tear maintenance/replacements, and things run pretty steep. If we could afford it, our going rates would be as nexter-to-nothinger as possibler. Help us keep this place energized and spirited and hoppin’, and we’ll turn that around as best we can into better hardware, better services, better events, and better prices.

Back on topic:

This is one we’re just going to try on for size and then see how well it fits. The logistics of it are pretty simple – it’s EXPIRY time (i.e. must be used when purchased, expires three hours after) that’s available on Monday through Saturday anytime before 4:00PM. That’s all there is to it.

On that abrupt note, memberships are being dissolved. The original idea was that they’d provide greater value to folks who come around more often and spend enough to want to save more, but most people never really took a look at the value, so memberships have always been thin. So we figure, why not pretty much treat everybody like a member from the start, eh?

At the moment, we’re evaluating how we want to fold in what used to be membership benefits into the normal fray. You can be sure we’ll have something to say on that sometime in the next few weeks. Rest assured, we want to keep things like birthday free time, membership referrals, what have you.

And for those of you who ARE currently members, we sure-as-got-damn-hell appreciate your love and loyalty, and thank you so hard, and have every intention of cashing out the cost of your membership in LAN hours once this noise takes effect.

Speaking of noise, these prices are officially going live on Monday, January 2nd.

There you have it. We’ll make everything neat and intuitive and freshlike when we post it on the LAN rates page, so you don’t have to read an entire wall-of-text newspost just to translate how it all works. Thanks for sticking with us, you attractive people.

Love always,
Game On!

Things have been a little trying over here at GO! corner these last few months, and it’s getting harder and harder for us to keep up with the games and hardware we’d so like to offer and you so rightly deserve. With that in mind, the value of our price scheme has also dipped somewhat.

A lot of people don’t seem to realize that at our store, the time you purchase stays on your account indefinitely, and is not an end-of-day expiry. It’s come to our attention that more than a few folk have glanced at our LAN pricing online, seen $4.00 for a single hour (the most expensive hour you can buy), and never come in and never looked back.

This is unfortunate.

You see, when we first opened up, we went through great troubles to establish a pricing model that would offer modular appeal and availability to any individual’s particular needs (whether you had three hours to kill, eight, or simply wanted to stock up on hours regardless of schedule), greater value/lesser cost the more hours you purchased (rewarding consistency and regular play), and a “starting price” (i.e. $4.00 for ONE hour) that wouldn’t drastically undercut the other local LAN businesses (averaging $5/hr.) and destabilize Denver’s market, thus bringing about a new world order.

Thing is, it’s been three years now. The market’s changed. A lot of those guys aren’t around anymore and most of their business/clientelle stayed on the other side of town. Some of that had to do with geography. Some with familiarity. Some, presumably, took that aforementioned glance at the most expensive price point on our chart and interpreted it as a baseline.

So, much as we LOVE our pricing, and think that things like $2.50/hr (8 hours) or $1.50/hr (40 hours/membership) are pretty awesome deals, it just doesn’t seem like the price model as a whole is as accessible to precursory investigation as we would like it to be.

That’s both bad and easy to fix.

Therefore, we’re going to be revising our pricing in several ways. First of all, we’ll be reducing it. Secondly, we’ll be simplifying it. (Well, sort of, but all of the complicated bits will be on the backend and the user won’t have to think twice about it.)

Hmm.. in broadstrokes, that’s more like two ways, but it shakes out to BIG DIFFERENCES! Differences like: cheaper prices overall, no particular quantities of hours that can’t be purchased, and a simplified version of the more-costs-less ethos we love so dear.

All of this will be announced in detail on Monday, December 26th and will take full effect on Monday, January 2nd.

In the meantime, we’d like to offer the holiday season at a discount price. From now until the new pricing takes effect, the following promotions are available to one and all:

Now remember, day passes are the only purchases of time that expire. Everything else stays on your account UNTIL- YOU- USE- IT.

We’d love it if you took advantage of these deals and spent some time with us this holiday season. We’ve still got a lot of plans in the works, and all of them involve trying to give you guys as many fun times and as much bang for your buck as possible. Theme nights, events, tournaments, more games, new hardware – these are all things we want to make happen on a regular basis.

And please, know this. Not a single one of us is taking any kind of wage, nor have we since the store opened. Every single dollar that Game On! makes goes right the heck back into Game On!.

Right now, our number one priority is transitioning the remainder of our PCs to larger capacity (and faster) hard drives, to accommodate more game options (and decrease the loading times of the OS, the Smartlaunch client, Steam, and large-quantity file games like Civilization). The more business we see, the faster that will happen, and the sooner we move on to the next big thing.

By the way, if there’s any particular game, event, or thingamabob you’d like to see in here, drop by our Facebook and let us know. The more we talk to eachother, the better.

We love you guys.

Happy holidays,
Game On!

Oh yeah~

We’ve been looking forward to Bioware’s MMO debut for some time now and are eager to celebrate this new installment in the Star Wars mythos. (Point of fact, some of our brood care ONLY about the Old Republic era.)

On Monday the 19th, we’ll be holding an Old Republic release party. Yes, most of you are likely to have your own copy and, yes, might prefer to play it on your own PCs, but~ we’re also hoping that some of you who are by then already in and playing – or perhaps didn’t get it early enough to pre-install and don’t want to wait to get it up and running – might be interested in joining a room full of people playing for the first time, that we can all experience it together!

Plus we’ll be showing Star Wars movies, opening the LAN for free, maybe playing some board games, and having a pot luck or ordering pizza or something (depends on who confirms wanting to show up and bring stuff)!

Oh, and we’ll also be giving away a copy of The Old Republic Collector’s Edition as a door prize.

Our crack team is planning on going the distance and we’d love to make an all-nighter out of it, just in case any of you cats are taking the next day off of work just to get your Sith or Jedi on.

Here are the details:

Date:
Monday, December 19th

Cost:
Free

Schedule:
6:00 PM – We start the original trilogy on the television
8:00 PM – Chow time
10:00 PM – LAN shifts to free play / The Old Republic open to all!
12:00 AM – Somebody wins The Old Republic Collector’s Edition!
4:00 AM – 5:00 AM – Closing time (we’ll see how it goes)

We look forward to seeing you there! (R.S.V.P. on Facebook)

Love always,
Game On!

**assuming EA/Bioware haven’t completely borked things and the servers are healthy

• Thanksgiving Day, we’ll be open from 4:00 PM until 10:00 PM. Since that’s only half our normal hours, the day pass for that day will be only $10.
• Black Friday we plan to be open from 10 AM to 2AM (normal schedule). Stay tuned for any upcoming deals.

Come for the music.

Whatever your reason, just be sure to come!

It’s our third birthday, you know?! We want to celebrate it with everybody!

Also, a little secret for you: We’re not currently expecting to break even for the cost of this event, but are REALLY hoping to. If that does manage to happen, then we’ll be investing every single extra penny into the LAN. Our current priorities are larger hard drives (to host more games), and acquiring Modern Warfare 3. In a perfect world, we’d like to get you guys a lot more than that (like Battlefield 3 and Skyrim and new video cards and more RAM..), so come to the party and help us pull it off!

Love always,
Game On!

Love always,
Game On!