Gamers and movie fans, you should check out my Movie Pitching Party game called Buy The Rights. I’ve been working on it since about April with my wife and my two best friends, and it’s up on Kickstarter!

In each round of Buy The Rights, one player is the Producer, and the other players are the Screenwriters. Screenwriters create their own movies by playing one card from each deck out of their hand. They then pitch their ideas to the Producer (getting as involved as they want with their pitches) and the Producer has a budget of $20 Million to spend on his/her favorites.

There are 400 cards, which equals to 100 Million possible combinations, and it’s a lot of fun! You can get the game for $25 with free shipping in the US, and we’re already over 30% funded in just a day and a half. Come check it out!

Back Buy The Rights on Kickstarter

Star Wars Battlefront I and II are both probably in my top five video games of all time. My love of Star Wars in addition to the addictive gameplay and awesome multiplayer of those games make them about perfect for me. Needless to say, I had a feeling that a new Battlefront game was going to drag me into the current generation of gaming, and I was right.

I told myself I was never going to get an Xbox One or a PS4. I have plans to (someday) build a kick-ass gaming PC and I didn’t see the point in a console other than the Wii U, but I changed my tune when I started reading some good things about the Xbox One, its upcoming backwards compatibility, and when an Amazon gift card for the exact amount of the console landed in my inbox.

My mysterious benefactor

Obviously I haven’t been updating this site much in the last couple years, but I still get a decent amount of search engine traffic thanks to my years worth of posts. Occasionally, I get a tiny amount of money from Amazon affiliate links, but it’s usually only a few dollars a month. A couple months ago, however, someone actually paid over $6,000 for an out-of-print LEGO Star Wars set (from this article) through one of my links, and I ended up with an Amazon gift card for about $350. Crazy.

Rather than use that on something I really needed, I decided that it was the universe telling me I needed to get a new gaming console so I could play Battlefront. Someone spent six grand on a Star Wars toy so I could play this game. Thanks, rich stranger.
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Hey folks! Once again it’s been forever since I’ve posted anything here, and once again it’s shameless self-promotion that brings me back. This time it’s for something I’m ridiculously excited about though; I created a board game!

Well, it doesn’t have a board, but it’s a party game called Buy The Rights and I think it’s pretty cool. It’s a game where players create their own movies based on four decks of cards, trying to come up with the best/funniest movie ideas and pitching them to the Producer, who then ‘buys the rights’ to the movie(s) they like best.

I’ve been working on it for quite a while now, and it’s almost done. In just a few weeks it will launch as my very first Kickstarter project. I’m working with AdMagic, the company that prints Cards Against Humanity and a bunch of other awesome games, on manufacturing, and I already hired the awesome Jason Smith to provide art for the cards. The game looks great even in prototype form, and will look even better if when it gets funded!

Buy the Rights is a true party game. It’s meant to get people laughing and isn’t meant to have a ton of rules, and because of that, it’s my type of game. Each deck has 100 cards which makes for 100 million possible combinations, so the game will have a lot of replay value. Here are a couple of my favorite movies that have been made in playtesting sessions so far:

Players are encouraged to really pitch their ideas to the producer, who changes each round. The Producer has a budget of $20 Million to spend on their favorite movies and can divide it up however they want, and the player with the most money at the end of the game wins.

The base game will be available for a $25 pledge, and that gets you 400 cards in a 11×7 box with a molded plastic insert, custom printed Buy the Rights play money, and instructions. Then we’ll have all sorts of awesome reward tiers with rewards designed by a lot of awesome artists and friends of the site. Art prints, button packs and stickers, and an exclusive t-shirt will all be available at various pledge levels.

If you’d like to stay up to date or just find out some more information, head over to the Buy the Rights website!

I’m a sucker for the design aesthetic of the NES. The color scheme, the shape and layout of the controller, and everything else. I also love emulation. I’ve written about OpenEmu a couple times, and I’ve been using a Wii U Pro controller with it a lot lately. It’s great and pairs easily with computers, but this NES-styled Bluetooth controller looks awesome.

Sure, it’s got four buttons (and shoulder triggers) instead of the classic two-button NES layout, but that just means you can use it for more than NES games. The NES30 looks very well built and sells for around $40. You can use it with your phone, tablet, or computer, and it would look cool just sitting on your desk. I’m going to pick one up and hope that they release a SNES-styled version sometime in the future. I’m more nostalgic about the NES controller, but the SNES had the best controller of all time, in my opinion.

Via Gizmodo

I like podcasts, websites, and books about video games just about as much as playing them. A movie about video games? I’m so there. A trailer for the forthcoming documentary Video Games: The Movie was just released.

It got its start as a Kickstarter campaign. The project raised over $100,000 a year ago. This is the first feature for writer-director Jeremy Snead who has a few short films to his credit.

The film is executed produced by actor Zach Braff and game creator Cliff Bleszinski (Unreal, Games of War). Former Microsoft exec J Allard, the guy who lead Xbox’s creation, is a co-producer. The doc has interviews with a wide variety of video game celebs like Chris Hardwick, Clare Grant, Wil Wheaton, and Alison Haislip.

Video Games: The Movie will be available on demand and in theaters on July 15. You can preorder on VHX.