This MatCatz Street Fighter IV Arcade FightStick Tournament Edition:  The Femme Fatale Edition was submitted by DarkMethod 10k, who stood in a very long line at PAX 2009 to get this limited edition fighting stick.  To be honest, I was hoping someone would submit this because I had heard about it and knew it was a rare piece.  Thanks, DarkMethod 10K!

This piece of barbarian goodness from Civilization Revolution was submitted by ATC 1982.  This piece get props because ATC 1982 says it’s his favorite piece.  Out of the ones he submitted, this is one of mine of his.  I love the detail on this figure!

Lizzie Johnson submitted this cool piece of swag from when the Halo ODST firetruck visited her hometown.  Very cool, Lizzie!

This piece of gaming bling was submitted by Spookty, who won this award at at a Game Stop competition playing Star Chase.   He placed in a few different games, but won the Star Chase event.  Grats, Spookty, and thank you!

See all of our great entries at the Show Me Your Swag flickr Photostream!

I want more entries for next month!!  Send me an e-mail at jennabee25 @ yahoo.com with your name, the name you want credit as, a jpg photo of your swag, and tell me about it!  I want to hear from you!  I’ll pick my favorite three or four entries for the month and all entries will be posted on the flickr stream.

To start off, click through for a few things that Sam and I have around the house that would make great examples of what I’m looking for.

First item up is the Soul Calibur IV key chain I got when I bought the game from a friend.  The key chain came with the pre-order.

These fuzzy guys came with my game Rune Factory:  A Fantasy Harvest Moon for the series’ 10th anniversary as a pre-order surprise!

This funky Super Mario Bros. mushroom came from Spencer’s gifts and is actually a container for mints. It was a great impulse purchase.

See what I want?  Start sending me your swag pics!

As Halloween approaches, I thought it might be fun to drum up a few geeky ideas to celebrate the night of tricking, treating, and lots of candy. Some these ideas are social, some are not, but all of them get in the spirit of the holiday.

1. Make your own geeky music list. Might I suggest starting with “Re: Your Brains” and “Creepy Doll” by Jonathan Coulton.
2. Throw a costume party. Require that all guests come as either as a video game, superhero, or movie. This blog entry has some great, and hilarious, ideas.
3. Curl up with a good, scary book. May I recommend Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters or Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters? (Truthfully, reading these books in the fashion is the only way I can stomach Austen)
4. Load up a film camera with black and white film and go take some creepy pictures of the Halloween decorations in your neighborhood.
5. Hand out goodies to the kiddies. Do something different like pencils, spider rings, or rubber eyeballs. Target has a wonderful selection of goodies like this.
6. Get on the zombie trend! Go watch Woody Harrelson’s Zombieland or Netflix something like Shaun of the Dead, Day of the Dead, or the Evil Dead.
7. Want something a little more absurd to watch? Pick up Army of Darkness. Bruce Campbell is the man!
8. Screw the whole thing play Forza 3, which is being released on October 27^th.
9. Still want to screw the whole thing? DJ Hero comes out the same day.
10. Finally, play creepy video game!! Dead Rising, anything in the Resident Evil series, Geist, Luigi’s Mansion, Left 4 Dead, or any horror survival game would make an excellent choice to play on Halloween. The only requirement: you must play with the lights OFF.

I hope this gives something to do on Halloween rather than dress up, go trick-or-treating, and pretend that you’re a kid. Just yanking your scary chain. Happy Halloween!

No, not even Halo can claim such a position. Hop on any video game message board in existence and say “What do you guys think about Halo?” and you’ll be met with three very distinct barrages of opinions – love, hate, and a middling indifference. This is as sure-fire a bet as the Internet can offer outside of Rule 34. In fact, very, very few games are those sacred cows. One of them is Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

I’m not going to slam the game. Put simply, I think it’s a fine game; but I don’t like it much at all. The reasons why this is the case are utterly irrelevant. I’d be willing to bet that every single person reading this article has a game, especially a highly-rated one from the last couple of years, that they could say this about. Not a game to be hated, to be claimed was overrated, or any other implication that anyone else’s opinion is flat-out wrong; just something they didn’t like for whatever reason that other people do. And I’d also be willing to bet that it’s a game you could say this about in front of your nerdiest peers, and they wouldn’t care that you thought that way.

A couple of days ago I opined on Twitter that I didn’t care a jot about the forthcoming Modern Warfare 2, because I hadn’t liked CoD4, its predecessor, either as a single-player or multiplayer game. (That I’m also somewhat sick of the forthcoming game’s infernal hype train is another irrelevance.) This led to several people on Twitter – including folks I consider friends, not just followers and followees – seeming shocked, surprised, and even a little saddened that I could possibly say such a thing. How could I dislike this game? This sacred cow that is held in such high esteem? How was that even possible? I had to be wrong. Broken, even. The very opinion itself was greeted with waves of disbelief and incredulity.

This is not to belittle any of those commenters in any way. They were – are – all people whose opinions I value, as it happens. I’m not calling them out or looking to pick a fight. I’m more perplexed at what the tone of the responses represent.

CoD4's not even my favorite game to feature the fascinating abandoned city of Pripyat.

Let me reiterate: I don’t think CoD4 is a bad game. Far from it. It just doesn’t float my boat, and it’s not because I have any dislike for the first-person shooter genre. There are many aspects to the game which ultimately combine to form what is, to me, a dealbreaker. That’s my purely subjective opinion and that’s all it is; and we all know what the ephemeral “they” say about opinions. The thing is, though, with practically any other game, I wouldn’t have to qualify it like that. It would be accepted, and moved past. Not CoD4. I don’t know if the game could be deified more if it had a Nintendo logo on it.

I listen to a lot of gaming podcasts. My day job allows me a lot of listening time and that’s one way I fill it. Most of these podcasts are helmed by hosts who know their co-hosts well; who in many cases also work together at websites or publications covering the same subject. Many don’t; some even do their shows with literal oceans or continents between hosts, conversing through Skype or some other means. But one thing they almost all seem to have in common is respect for their co-hosts’ tastes. If one of them doesn’t like The Hot Game of the Moment, it’s not a big deal. Is it familiarity with each other that breeds this respect? Is it implicit on its own merits? Or is it simply that, well in excess of 99% of the time, the subject under discussion isn’t a sacred cow?

Why is it that it can be so well-accepted that someone, be they a little minnow like me or a big fish in the pond of the gaming press, may not give a damn about Final Fantasy XIII, or Forza Motorsport 3, or Halo 3 ODST, or Uncharted 2, or even Brütal Legend – the latter the perfect example of a game that should be a sacred cow – but the moment I say I don’t care about a hugely-hyped FPS because I didn’t care for its prequel (a game that to date has sold more copies than World of Warcraft has subscribers), the immediate reaction – and one I’d more than likely get from practically any corner of the internet with any interest in video games whatsoever – is spluttering denial and disbelief from the faithful while anyone who shared my opinion kept their heads down? (Therein lies the great disparity by comparison to the earlier example of Halo.) It’s not because CoD4 is objectively better than every other game I’ve namechecked so far. It’s barely even comparable to most of those by virtue of its genre; those old apples and oranges, and all that. It’s almost like a cult of personality, only – if you’ll excuse more fruit references – this isn’t some banana republic’s dictator; it’s a video game. Nothing more, nothing less.

Modern Warfare 2 is developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision, and is scheduled for release on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC on November 10th 2009. The author will not be purchasing it but wishes many hours of entertainment to the plethora of readers who will.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was released in November 2007 and has sold over 13 million copies to date across all platforms. It remains one of the most-played online console games in the world.

The Lynx’s gestation began at Epyx, a company better known for software, especially on the Commodore 64 in the mid-’80s. The machine eventually came to to market in 1989, after Atari had picked up the project – originally codenamed Handy – and renamed it. Funnily enough, it would remain a bone of contention that the development environment for the Lynx was based on the 16-bit Commodore Amiga computer – the direct competitor to Atari’s own comparable ST line of computers in the still-multiplatform home computer marketplace of the late ’80s and early ’90s before the PC’s performance and price levels caught up to became the de facto standard.

The Lynx was the first of what would become a succession of Game Boy competitors. Sega would eventually release the Game Gear and later the Nomad, and NEC the TurboExpress, a portable TurboGrafx-16, but these machines suffered similar flaws to those that plagued the Lynx as well as coming out far too late, years after the Game Boy had already established its dominance.

The redesigned Lynx II

The Lynx represented a completely different approach to handheld consoles than Nintendo’s all-conquering little machine. For a start, it was portable only in a technical sense, relatively speaking. Close to twice the size of the Game Boy, it also drained batteries far faster (making the AC adapter less of an optional extra and more of a necessity), and its backlit screen, while great in a dark environment, was near-useless in daylight. An optional sun-shield accessory was a less-than-ideal solution. Also, the system’s reliability and build quality was fairly poor. A redesigned Lynx that was often referred to unofficially as the Lynx II wasn’t too far behind the original, correcting several physical design flaws – for example, replacing the original’s bizarre side-opening cartridge hatch with a traditional cart slot, and finally offering stereo output through the headphone socket – as well as offering significantly better build quality and also slightly improving the atrocious battery life.

However, it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Both variants of the Lynx offered a symmetrical horizontal layout with the option to flip over for left-handed use, connectivity between up to eight consoles (if you were lucky enough to know any other Lynx owners), a vibrant color display and – for the time – hugely powerful hardware. While the screen hasn’t aged well in the intervening two decades, the hardware has – it wasn’t until the Game Boy Advance launched in 2001, twelve years after the Lynx’s debut, that a more powerful handheld console was available. While its capability to do truly polygonal 3D visuals was limited, it could fudge 3D effects remarkably well due to its incredible sprite-handling abilities. Scaling and rotation of hundreds of sprites at once were its specialties, matched even in home consoles only by the advent of the SNES and Sega CD years later. Some games even used both sprite-scaling and polygonal 3D at the same time, often to great effect.

The result of this weirdly powerful but esoterically-designed hardware was a plethora of remarkably unique games, mostly by Atari and Epyx themselves – as is so often the case with ultimately failed consoles, third-party publisher and developer support was severely lacking, and by the time the plug was finally pulled, the Lynx had a relatively small library of available games. However, the flipside of this trait is that the system has a very small amount of shovelware in that library, and indeed it has a reasonable number of fantastic titles – including some great conversions of arcade titles of the era – that remain well worth playing even now.

Here’s just a few of my favorites:

Chip’s Challenge – One of the Lynx’s best games didn’t really take advantage of the system’s crazy hardware abilities much at all. Chip’s Challenge was a stage-based puzzle game, where you guide nerdy Chip through some of the most devious, evil and brain-melting traps you’ve ever come across. Yes, it’s a puzzler that will challenge (ho ho) your smarts as well as reaction times. It doesn’t look like much, but appearances can be deceptive.

S.T.U.N. Runner – Atari’s 1989 arcade tunnel-racer-cum-shoot-’em-up game was converted (I hesitate to use the rather inaccurate term ‘port’ in this bygone era of gaming) for virtually every noteworthy computer system under the sun, but every one was a dismal failure except the Lynx version. Even by the Lynx’s standards, the game’s re-working of the arcade classic’s blistering 3D visuals using sprite-scaling was a technical tour de force.

Xybots – One of the earliest examples of a co-operative shooter in a 3D environment, Xybots originally appeared in arcades in 1987. The Lynx version dispensed with the other versions’ split-screen layout in favor of utilizing the link cable, but was otherwise identical. Before 3D visuals evolved to the point where games like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom became feasible, Xybots gave us a glimpse of where we were headed, and was a damn fine game in its own right. Bonus: the main characters have two of the best names in gaming history: Major Rock Hardy and Captain Ace Gunn.

Todd’s Adventures in Slime World – An almost Metroid-esque, side-scrolling shooty explore-’em-up, Slime World mixed up beautifully gooey graphics (it’s amazing what the Lynx’s graphics hardware can do with oozing, dripping snot) tons of secrets, solid action, a bunch of different modes and support for up to eight players both co-operatively and competitively to become one of the system’s classics. It even includes a zit-popping mini-game! Just what you’ve always wanted, I know.

Gates of Zendocon – This side-scrolling shoot-’em-up (we didn’t call them ’shmups’ back then) was less remarkable for its action as it was for its exploration. Its 51 levels could be explored in a non-linear fashion through the titular gates at the end – and sometimes in the middle – of whichever level you happened to be in at the time, and the visual diversity was so imaginitive that you’d always want to see where you’d end up next. Explosions that would literally fill the screen without a hint of slowdown were the icing on the cake.

“Oh Diamond! Diamond! Thou little knowest the mischief done!” (Said to a pet dog who knocked over a candle and set fire to his papers) I guess when it came down to it, rather having a dog EAT his homework, the dog burned Sir Isaac Newton’s work and he was not happy about it, no matter how flowery his speech was.

Newton was a sickly, strange man. Besides coming up with theories on physics that ushered in a modern era of new thinking, he also messed around with some pretty strange stuff, such as alchemy. Keep in mind, during Newton’s time, alchemy was still considered a viable science. In his own ignorance, sadly, Newton would often drink quicksilver (liquid mercury). Quicksilver was thought to kill certain diseases at the time and since Newton himself was sickly most of his life, he must’ve thought he was doing himself a favor. In reality, he was poisoning himself.

In true geek fashion, Newton was still an overachiever and was one of the brainiest geeks the world has known. In modern day, I could see him teaching at an Ivy League school or dominating somewhere in Silicon Valley. Oh, and the apple thing….never happened.

“If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.  I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.” This is one of the reasons why I like Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla. He was the smarter of the two when it came to Thomas Edison, who was his bitter rival.

Tesla was eccentric to say the least. He was possibly one of the first mainstream scientists to theorize about UFO’s, for example. One of the best qualities that made him a good scientist was that he could visualize his inventions to the most minute measurement and dimension, besides having a great photographic memory. He invented the radio before Guglielmo Marconi, pioneered robotics and electronics, and magnetism. And let’s not forget those hella cool Tesla coils.

I believe that if Tesla was alive today, he would be designing some pretty wicked cool video games and systems or designing weapons systems, such as that direct energy ray he theorized.

“Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.” Ah, Albert Einstein. His brilliance, his snarkiness, his wild hair. Those things aside, he was probably the most brilliant physicist who has lived.

The above quote sort of encompasses Einstein as a person. He was a brat as a child because he always challenged authority and stuck with own ideas, besides being extremely cocky. And like Tesla, he thought out and designed his theories visually. He was also a wonderful musician, too, excelling in the violin. His offices were notoriously messy with papers and books everywhere. Einstein was probably the first scientist to be a celebrity. People would stop him on the street and ask him to explain “that theory” (theory of relativity). He would say that he just LOOKS like the guy who came up with it to get out of the conversation. Actually, he did have a simple explanation for it by stating: There is no hitching post in the Universe- so far as we know.

If still alive, Einstein would probably be teaching at Princeton. Or else he would be a very smart rock star. Perhaps he would even be working for NASA putting those physics theories to use to discover more of the cosmos and even Tesla’s UFO’s.

I hope in some way, shape, or form I have shown off three historical geeks and some of their geeky elements. There are tons of geeks out there, not just gamer geeks, but math geeks, electronics geeks, musical geeks, literature geeks, and geeks who do some pretty weird stuff. Gamer geeks may have some of these qualities. I myself am a music geek. Can we say “marching band?” And I know a lot of you out there have some pretty brilliant qualities in common with these three fine gentlemen. So I say to you, geek it up! We have a fine heritage.

We all know the vision and stigma people get when they think of a “gamer”:  Sweaty.  Overweight.  Anti-social.  Violent.  Unemployed.  Computer nerd.  Inactive.  Messy.  I know some of you, and that is definitely NOT true.

I was recently in a situation that were some co-workers said behind my back, within earshot, and knowing full well what my hobbies are, “There is more to life than video games.”  Ouch!  Talk about passive-aggressive stabby-stabs!  It really did hurt and I was quite angered.

Here’s why anyone who states that gaming is a waste of time is wrong.  What do these people do to relax?  Many of them watch TV for hours on end and that’s it. At least I think video games are more interactive and social than gaping at the boob toob.  Sam and I don’t even have cable.   We have HD rabbit ears and they aren’t even plugged in.

Gamers get on forums, speak to each other on voicechat during games, and even meet each other in person!    Sounds like a good way to connect with people and make some friends to me!  Also, some of these video game poo-pooers have to recall that even if they play solitaire on the PC they are engaging in a video game. They may not necessarily be classified as a “gamer,” but it they are certainly utilizing gaming technology!

In less hostile situations like the one outlined earlier, I explain how I enjoy the story of a game, or how I like solving the puzzles.  I try help people realize that there are more video games out there than the ones that people hear negative news about, like the Grand Theft Auto series.  All that crap comes from dumb people, ranging from stupid parents who buy their kids a game with an M rating, to Jack Thompson riling up the masses with so-called moral outrage.  So, the key is EDUCATION.  Help non-gamers understand the range of what is out there and the truth behind the hype.  I’m not saying go on a crusade, but steer people in the right direction when misinformation gets out.  Anyone remember that Mass Effect flap?

Another way I have found that helps with dealing with non-gamers is pick up and play games, which is why the Wii has become so successful.  Otherwise, I like to engage people in the SingStar games.  Who can’t follow words and sing into a mic?  We had my aunt over to dinner, and she played that and had a blast.  She doesn’t have a console, but she does a lot of stuff on Pogo.com for fun and to relax, so she understands. I even have a friend coming on Saturday and we are going to sing along to SingStar Queen, since we are both big fans of the band.  She is also a video game-a-phobe, but is anxious to try this because of the dangling of the proverbial musical carrot named QUEEN.

A third way I believe has to do with being good gamer citizens, meaning we are responsible people who take care of ourselves, have jobs, and generally contributing members of society.  Many people have a stereotypical gamer image in their minds.  Granted, there is some truth in stereotypes, but still, it’s not always accurate.  Many gamers are well-educated people with good jobs and other social interests.

Want some proof that video games are doing good?  Want some ammunition?  Check out this Cracked.com article.

Video games are the comic books and rock’n'roll of our generation. They are the new entertainment media that the previous generation rails against.  Rock music, comic books, and video games?  I say that’s a good time.

The first web comic that I started to read was Sluggy Freelance. When I started Sluggy, as it is colloquially known, it already had eight years of backlog reading behind it. Pete Abrams, the writer and artist known for his recurring story lines and knife-wielding bunny, will be celebrating Sluggy’s 12^th birthday at the end of this month.

Others followed, such as Penny Arcade, which celebrated its tenth birthday this year. Penny Arcade, besides being a cool comic, is a cornerstone in the gaming world. “Tycho” and “Gabe” have a comic that is often fantastic commentary on the gaming industry, they hold a highly-regarded gaming convention that anyone can attend, and they have an amazing charity called Child’s Play that donates game systems and games to children in the hospital.

Generally, my mornings start off with a bowl of knock-off Cheerios and surfing the Internet. The first thing I check are my web comic updates. Besides the two above, here’s what on my comic list.

• Anders Loves Maria by Rene Engestrom. Love and drama in Sweden. Not always safe for work.

• Octopus Pie by Meredith Gran. Grumpy half-Chinese girl puts up with her stoner roommate and devious, amongst other things. Great inking style.

• Penny and Aggie by T. Campbell and Gisele Lagace. Teenage high school drama in Canada. Some adult subjects. Also, very excellent art on artist Lagace’s part.

• Questionable Content by Jeph Jacques. Hipster and indie fun. It’s great to read the backlog and watch Jeph’s art style improve.

• Wondermark by David Malki!. He takes old-timey drawings and makes them funny.

My husband and WoWo guru, Sam, also reads some of the above (not the girly stuff), but also has a few that I think would interest people.

• Dueling Analogs by Steve Napierski

• Extra Life by Scott Johnson

• Order of the Stick by Rich Burlew

• Real Life by Greg Dean

• xkcd by Randall Munroe

There are two more web comics of note that I would like to point out before I wrap things up. First, even though it’s pretty much defunct, Zach VandeZande has left his comic Animals Have Problems Too up and you can read the backlog.  I recommend you do. It’s a riot.

I want to introduce you to Shell’s Angels by our own SOC resident artist and writer Michelle Juett. You can read her comic on her web comic site and on her deviantART site. Check out her dA site for some other amazing work, too. If want a quick sampling of her stuff, look up. She drew our lovely castle logo.

I imagine many of you read these same comics and I hope that you find some you haven’t read before. I know many of us here met through Penny Arcade via another forum, so I guess web comics even bring people together. And that’s a great thing about our wonderful geeky culture.

Mass Effect was my personal Game of the Year for 2007, above and beyond the enormous wealth of other top-tier games that year. It certainly had some problems, most of them technical – a bad case of texture pop-in, an often somewhat sluggish framerate, and the infamously lengthy elevator rides, for example – but as well as ultimately overcoming its flaws to become an enjoyable and thrilling game, it also spawned what has rapidly become my favorite science-fiction universe. Sure, it’s extremely derivative (take your pick from Star Wars, Star Trek, the original Battlestar Galactica, Blade Runner, and any number of others) but its somewhat retro aesthetic means it’s also happy to wear these influences on its sleeve rather than trying to conceal them. The spectacular John Carpenter-esque, synth-heavy soundtrack also demonstrates the designers’ love for late-’70s to early-’80s space opera, and the in-game codex offers a colossal amount of backstory for those who care to get drawn into it. Fittingly, the game’s limited collector’s edition included a pair of remarkably extensive books: an art book detailing further the game’s beautiful design; and a backstory book, presented as a guide issued to a human visiting the Citadel, the central hub of the galactic community, for the first time. Also included was a second DVD which expands on both the art and the creation of the game and its setting.

Drew Karpyshyn's two Mass Effect novels

Thankfully, after crafting such a vast, intricate and surprisingly believable universe, BioWare weren’t going to let it end there. Mass Effect is the first of a planned trilogy of games (Mass Effect 2 is on course for an early 2010 release date and garnered a huge amount of praise when it was shown at this year’s E3 expo), but there’s more besides. Lead writer Drew Karpyshyn – whose enviable resumé also includes three Star Wars books, the novelization of Baldur’s Gate II, and the seminal 2003 BioWare game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic – has also written a pair of Mass Effect novels: Revelation, which covers both the backstory of humanity’s growth into a spacefaring race and subsequently their becoming part of the larger galactic community (including the problems this caused with the four-eyed batarians), and the history between David Anderson and Saren Arterius, which essentially sets the central plot of the first game in motion; and Ascension, which explores the xenophobic human black-ops organization Cerberus as well as investigating in more detail the unfortunate quarian race, exiled to their ramshackle Migrant Fleet after their creation of the geth, the antagonist race from the first game. Both books expand on the universe greatly, and are also available as unabridged audiobooks, read by the excellent David Colacci, who conveys perfectly the characters and drama of the stories.

Somewhat less successful was the spin-off iPhone/iPod Touch game, Mass Effect Galaxy, which provides a backstory on one of the companion characters set to be featured in Mass Effect 2. The game was poorly reviewed, and unfortunately I can’t offer my own thoughts on it as I don’t have access to the necessary hardware to play it. Still, thus far it remains the only negative blip on a very strong body of work.

Given BioWare’s generally high standards so far at expanding on the universe of Mass Effect, as well as Dark Horse’s own great reputation, I have no doubt that the Redemption comic series will match up to what’s gone before. It’s a shame, really, that the available fiction will never be quite as vast a library as something like Star Wars enjoys, but it’s still a huge credit to BioWare that despite their universe being so obviously derivative, it stands on its own as well as it does; and I for one hope that as the trilogy of games ultimately winds up, there’ll be more of the Mass Effect expanded universe to dive into. One fairly sizeable concern on this front is that Drew Karpyshyn is relocating from BioWare’s Edmonton studio to their Austin studio to focus on the forthcoming MMO game Star Wars: The Old Republic. With any luck, though, we’ll see much more of this superlative IP.

I hope that your summer is going well and you are enjoying your sunny vacations on the beach, tanning by the pool, or in the fine air conditioning of your own home. Perhaps you are reading one of the books I suggested last time? I just had to ask.

Now, there are some obvious ones…..Star Trek movies, Star Wars movies, Monty Python movies, and they are all great and I will probably discuss each and their influence at a later time, as I already have with Star Trek. I’m going to stick with some lesser-known stuff.

Inevitably, there is going to be some bad weather during the summer. Perhaps it’s raining and you are feeling depressed because your barbecue was cancelled. May I suggest one of the geeky movies below? Some are funny, some are cool, and others are just in a class of their own. Here are five that I recommend.

1. TRON: This is the first geek movie that actually hooked me. I know it’s old (1982), but it is groundbreaking because it was one of the first movies to use a lot of computer graphics. It’s got a really good story, too. Besides that, it has spawned a few video games and there are rumors of a sequel coming in 2011.
2. The Fifth Element: To me, this is just a good all-round fun sci-fi romp. I love that it’s a colorful science-fiction movie with a ridiculous villain played by Gary Oldman. What I don’t like is Chris Tucker’s big-mouthed character. Oh, and Leelo Dallas Mul-ti-pass.
3. Unbreakable: Surprisingly, this is what I think is M. Night Shyamalan’s best movie. I know, it’s another Bruce Willis movie, but I really enjoyed this one. Besides Shyamalan’s usual twists, there’s a theme with comic books, and there are some of us geeks out there who just happen to love them.
4. Futurama: Bender’s Big Score: This is the first and the best of the four full-length straight-to-DVD Futurama movies that were recently released. It fits perfectly with Futurama canon, has one of the most complex and well-written stories for a cartoon movie that I can think of. The other three Futurama movies are so-so, but the successes of all four have reaped some fantastic rewards. Comedy Central will be picking up the show for 26 new episodes!
5. The Blues Brothers: Yeah, there is really nothing geeky about this movie, but it is MY all-time favorite movie, so HA, it gets on the list. My own childish pettiness aside, I believe there are fellow geeks out there would enjoy it. It has some awesome music, and features two great comedians.

I hope this short list gives you something new to watch beyond the normal geek movie fare. The oldies are goodies, I will admit, but there is a ton of great stuff out there. Got any other good movie suggestion? Leave a comment and discuss!

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