We’ve got a lot of announcements to get through today, so bear with me. In fact, I’m going to break it down into bullet points right this very now, just so you can know exactly what’s going in this post:

• Halloween party, contest, promotion
• Minecraft server and contest
• Anniversary event, some details, and blog/site launch

Every single one of these is a big deal! Super cereal!

Let’s dig in.

On Friday, October 28th, we’ll be throwing a Halloween party, and we FULLY EXPECT YOU TO SHOW UP IN THE MOST AWESOME COSTUMES. In fact, we’re willing to sweeten that deal in more than a few ways.

Not only are we going to have some free-for-all candy for everybody in dress (why should you be deprived of trick-or-treating after all), but we’ll also offer you one free normal concession, three free hours of LAN time, and the option to purchase a 3 hours for $5 promotion which you can totally get twice.

Wait, wasn’t there something else? Oh that’s right..

There’s also going to be a costume contest sponsored by The Wizard’s Chest! They will be generously awarding a $40 gift card for their store to the winner. Not only that, but they are additionally offering a discount to anybody who does any of their costume shopping at The Wizard’s Chest. All you have to do to get this discount is pick up a coupon on the front counter of our store (Game On!, just to remind you) then go to The Wizard’s Chest to grab your bits and also your pieces.

So, get all your gussies in a row and we’ll see you next Friday. All of the deals will start around 6:00 PM and we recommend that you show up sooner than later because we’ll need some time to take in everyone’s costumes in order to announce a winner at 8:30.

Keep an eye on the Facebook and Twitter feeds ’cause we’ll probably come up with a few more fun things that we can do that night. (You can R.S.V.P. here.)

Those who were paying attention (shame on the rest of you) know that we recently switched internet service providers and are now carrying a great deal more bandwidth for a moderately reduced price. We didn’t even take a hit on latency!

One of the benefits of this new voodoo is that we now have the option to start hosting dedicated servers. Now we’d like to assure you that we will absolutely be getting around to more stuff like Team Fortress 2 and Call of Duty and goodness knows what else, but naturally just had to start with..

Minecraft.

We are pleased- as- punch- to announce that Game On! has an official dedicated Minecraft server. We’re so pleased as so punch that we actually wanted to announce our anniversary at the exact same time.

Why?

Well, because there’s going to be a contest.

We invite and encourage our community to join us on our server and build homes and cities and monuments and statues and spires and transportation systems and overworlds and all kinds of cool things. Really, build to your heart’s content. We want to see you there. We want to see an entire world populated by the communal content of all of our friends.

You have from now until Nov. 14th (the Monday prior to the anniversary) to hop onto our server (x.gameondenver.com), devise and build some monument of game-related awesome, then show it to us. We’ll use our (as yet completely undetermined) criteria to judge why your piece of awesome is better or worse than somebody else’s piece of awesome.

We will then be racked with guilt for weeks.

Which leads us nicely into the announcement that has really been far, far too long in coming:

GAME ON! CON

Okay, okay, it’s not quite a full-on convention proper, but the fact remains that this year’s anniversary event is a sight bigger and more ambitious than any we’ve done in the past. Also, we can call it what we want!

For starters, we spoke to our property manager and actually secured a WHOLE SECOND SPACE for an entire weekend just to accomodate MORE STUFF. We will have tournaments for Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Super Street Fighter IV (Arcade Edition), Mortal Kombat, League of Legends, Starcraft 2, and maybe even one or two more. We’re going to have a whole slew of silly contests, including the return of Mr. Taylor’s super great trivia, and an expansive take on the Crossfire frenzy that went so well on year one. There will be dedicated movie rooms. There will be rooms dedicated to table-top, board, and collectible card gaming (courtesy of Troll Country Games). There will be live performances by local ska bands Ska Skank Redemption and Hatrick Penry, as well as local chiptune artist Aethernaut. Not to mention normal PC LAN play, retro console stations, fighter friendlies, at least one arcade cabinet on freeplay, a whole mess of Rock Band, food, SWAG bags for EVERY ATTENDEE, and miscellaneous other activities.

Oh, and how could we forget the raffle? With over ten contributors already and more still coming, this year’s raffle is shaping up something impressive. For now, we’re standing by the usual assertion of at least $1500 in prizes to be won, but I’m trying my damnedest to get that upwards of at least two grand.

Cross your fingers.

So. To streamline all of the details and forthcoming information regarding this year’s much more sizable anniversary event (please to call GO!CON), we’ve cobbled together a dedicated blog/sub-site for you to follow.

From now until the end of november, consider this GO!CON Central.

We’ll be continually tweaking a few things, constantly updating, and adding a tournament pre-register, but be sure to favourite/bookmark/star the blog to keep up with any anniversary-related news.

We’re really looking forward to this one and hope you will too! (R.S.V.P. on Facebook)

That’s all for now. (Still lots of news to come in the next few days.)

Love always,
Game On!

Flower Power!

Right at this moment, Brian and I have been having a bit too much fun with Uniracers and we thought you (our fair audience) might like to join us. Hence, it’s time for a competition!

And the moment I say “competition” at least half of you will ask “and what’s in it for me” so, the prizes are as follows:

• 1st place: a 6-month membership to the LAN
• 2nd place: $15 certificate to used at GAME ON however you feel inclined (LAN or Retail)

The rules will be really simple. We’ll do a double elimination bracket using the game’s VS mode to actually run the matches. For the tracks, we will do the eighth tour for the finals, the seventh tour for the semi-finals and work our way backwards from there depending on bracket size. Whoever wins the tour wins the match.

So when’s this all happening, you might be wondering? Saturday, October 15th, beginning at 3:00PM. We’ll start free play going at some point beforehand just in case some of you might be a bit rusty (it is an SNES game after all). Go forth to Facebook if you would like to R.S.V.P!

And oh yeah, before I completely forget, there’s no entry fee. Zero. None at all.

Quick question for those paying attention, but what does John Leguizamo, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Robin Shou have in common?

If you guessed cheesy/crappy 90′s video-game-movie actors, you win!

Since you all will be stopping by for our wonderful, shiny new internetz, we figured we would provide a bit more entertainment (and some testing via Netflix) in the form of movies that should probably best be forgotten.

That’s right, we’ll be torturing you all with Super Mario Bros, Street Fighter The Movie, and Mortal Kombat. So, for those of you who need a break from your shouting matches during League, you can gorge yourself on popcorn while reminiscing about how good you wanted these movies to be when you first saw the previews.

First, we’ll start with Super Mario Bros.

Then we’ll move on to Street Fighter.

And finally, Mortal Kombat.

We start the movie reel going at 3pm. If you didn’t have a reason to stop by before (See previous post!), you now have one. Remember, it’s not considered torture if you are in it willingly!

Some of these things have been a VERY long time coming, but we’re thrilled to finally announce a whole mess of current, immediate, and forthcoming pieces of awesome!

For those of you who didn’t know, we moved into this space under the very natural assumption that cable internet would be an option available to us. It was the year 2008 and the flowers were in full bloom, and we had no earthly reason to think that there were still places in a highly-populated metropolitan area whose commercial properties were absent the presence of coaxial cable.

Go figure.

First, we signed up for several bonded lines of DSL, but ended up paying far too much for lines that promised far too little and ultimately yielded far too much signal degradation. (Hooray, overpaying for things that don’t even deliver what you paid for!) After some investigation, we opted for a third-party internet service provider that cost an arm and a leg (of which we have only so many) to provide barely-adequate bandwidth, but also that ever-necessary low ping; this was our two bonded T1 lines, which we still have.

(I mean, we could hardly call ourselves a responsible gaming center if Counter-Strike players can’t successfully sweep their shots.)

Now, as many of you are SURE to know, we’ve had more than a few issues with our internet connectivity and availability at times, as our current pipeline is oh- so- thin. Patching can be a mess. Updating can be a mess. Downloads and installs and internet streaming and pretty much anything else anybody might want to do in this place can be such a mess.

So we’ve spent the last three years lobbying to Comcast as often as possible to please, Please, PLEASE come on over and get some coax running to our building. An already too long story cut impossibly short, they eventually heard our call:

We now have cable internet.

Originally, our assumption was that this would provide all of the bandwidth we could ever need, and we could thus drop one of our T1 lines. Naturally, we would retain the other and shape traffic to maintain the new, wider pipeline but also direct the established lower latency where needed.

As it happens, there’s a very real chance that our business class cable internet might very well additionally provide the low latency so necessary for our logistical and your gaming needs. If this should be the case, then we could drop the T1 lines entirely, which would moderately reduce some of our operational costs, freeing up much-needed money to dedicate towards hardware upgrades and other investments in the LAN.

(On this, we cannot currently make any defined promises. We do ask you to know, however, that one of our TOP priorities is the quality of our PCs, and we’re investigating as many options as possible to keep software and hardware current, powerful, and insanely great.)

In the interest of the above-mentioned “Cable vs. Cable + T1″ (get it?) hypothesis, we thought it would be fun to ask you guys to help us troubleshoot. After all, it’s your internet too. Now this is an incredibly complicated procedure, so please listen very carefully, okay?

We need you to play video-games.

Specifically, we need a roomful of people playing all different kinds of things so we can monitor and distinguish variables like streaming music or video, Ventrillo, games what require low ping, games what don’t require low ping, and so on. We want the LAN full of mirth and merriment and craziness and we want you to push our brand-spanking new internet as far as you can, just so’s we can see its limits and which seams’ll start to tear first.

Considering that the future of all that is good in the world depends on the outcome of these proceedings, we think it best that we just throw LAN time at you crazy cheap and let you go to town (perhaps paving the way to additional crazy cheap promotions in the future). So, for this Friday and Saturday only, we are offering “10 Hours for $10“. You can purchase this time on either Friday or Saturday, but you can use it whenever you like (we do ask that you stick around and help us keep the room full). You’re also welcome to take advantage of the deal up to two times, for a maximum twenty hours for twenty bucks. I’m really not too good with things mathematical, but I think it shakes out to somewhere near a dollar an hour.

SO! Come play vidja-games with us and help us shape both our internet traffic and our future.

By the way, in case some of the implications of our higher bandwidth (more upload too) haven’t fully made themselves apparent, we’d like to say a few words. Bullet points, take it away:

• Higher resolution music and video streaming without affecting others
• Faster internet browsing
• MUCH faster and less conditional updates/patches (no more Valve bottlenecks on Fridays, juggling PCs, or waiting around for large updates)
• Quicker Steam log-ins
• Dedicated game servers; locally hosted, remotely accessible (e.g. CS, Modern Warfare, TF2, L4D, Minecraft, etc.)
• Dedicated VoIP servers (e.g. Ventrillo)
• Event/tournament live-streaming

We still have to do our troubleshooting and get everything better situated, but most of these bullets ARE guaranteed, and those that aren’t are all very likely to happen soon (with future posts and elaboration).

That’s all for now, but there will definitely be a slew of BIG news posts over the next few weeks. Our new internet is the first of several game-changers we have in store and we look forward to waxing loquacious about all of them.

Also, keep your eyes peeled for some good upcoming event announcements:

• It Hurts So Good: Terribad Video-Game Movie Night
• Indie Game Showcase
• Halloween Party
• Third-Year Anniversary (see also: Game On! Con)

Love always,
Game On!

It’s been a long time in coming back (we did one of these years ago) but search no more: we’re holding a Left 4 Dead 2 Survival Tournament. Where by there shall be you, three of your  friends, and zombies. Lots and lots of zombies. 

The rules are simple enough:

• Teams must be comprised of exactly 4 members (pick ups allowed, Game On! employees constitute fair game).
• Each team gets three (3) attempts and only the best time is taken.
• The team that survives the longest wins.
• Map: The Waterfront (L4D2)
• Play Mode: Survival

Event Date/Time: Saturday September 17th, 2011 starting at 4:00PM!

The Prize: 40 LAN Hours for the winning team (or 10 hours per person)!

There’s no entry fee, so come one, come all, and try your luck against THE ZOMBIE HORDE!

R.S.V.P available on Facebook.