Pre-Order Pain or Pleasure?

Are you a fan of bonus pre-order content? Do you think it's rewarding the faithful for putting money down on their favorite franchises or are they merely being exploited by promising content that varies from decent to worthless?

Today Deux Ex: Mankind Divided's pre-order bonuses were announced. It's unique in that you don't just get one pre-order bonus, you get several, in different tiers. This graph should explain better than my words can: 

As you can see, there are different tiers that offer different rewards, with the grand prize being able to play the game 4 days early. How do you unlock the other tiers? It's not anything fun like beating a flash game or demo or completing some kind of challenge. It's dependent entirely on the hope of other people pre-ordering the game. That's right. Aside from urging, some would argue bugging, your friends to pre-order the game there's not a thing you can do.

At the very least this isn't like Watch Dogs, which had so many pre-orders and versions of the game spread across so many different retailers that a graph had to be made just to clearly show what versions had which pieces of DLC attached to it.

That's not even touching on the fact that sometimes there are console exclusive content. The first time I remember this was with the release of Soul Calibur 4, with the 360 getting Yoda and Vader going to PS3 owners. If you had both systems, congrats, pick your favorite character. But, if you only have one console (or, if you happen to not own the console that comes with the console exclusive content), tough luck. Granted, we know now that those two characters would later be offered as paid DLC, but at the time we didn't. 

Sometimes the content is already on the disk (which kind of defeats the purpose of downloadable content. It's supposed to be downloaded.). And the only way to unlock all the content is by simply pirating the game In an effort to stave off piracy, or drum up hype for game by getting you to promise your dollars upfront, publishers may have inadvertently made piracy much worse and thus resulting in less revenue not more.

What do you think? Do you like Pre-Order bonuses or do you think it's a fad that needs to die?  

- Fel

The Mixed-Race Storm Family

The reboot of Fantastic Four is here! From its first announcement the movie been surrounded in controversy. Some fans think the Fantastic Four rights should return to Marvel so they can be implemented in the Marvel Cinematic Universe while others are ok with it being under Fox as long as they give it the love and care its pedigree deserves. Yet one thing they both sides seem to agree on is that the race difference between Johnny and Sue storm makes no sense, making that issue more controversial than it really should be in the 21st century. I'm not going to delve into whether we should be re-racing, is that a word, classic characters. Instead, I'm going to focus purely on the science behind how Sue Storm can be White while Johnny sports a cocoa complexion. Keep in mind I haven't seen the movie yet, so it's entirely possible the movie has explained it and this video will be 100% useless as opposed to just being mostly useless right now.

Anyone who's taken a Bio 100 class should remember how dominate and recessive genes work. For those of you who don't, I'm here to explain everything with a simple table called the Punnette Square.

Lets say that a black man and a white woman have a child together. What skin color would that child have? If you said brown, you're right. But it's a bit more complicated than that. See the father had two dominate genes while the mother had two recessive genes. So, that would give their children both a dominate and a recessive gene. Even though they're half and half, the dominate gene is just that, dominate. So, the child is mocha, instead of being looking like a S'More.

These genes do come into play when that offspring decides to have offspring of their own. Lets say this person decides to make it a family tradition and marry another Caucasian. What color will their children be? If you said brown, you'd be half right. In reality, it's a coin flip. Remember that recessive trait? It's still there. And, using the Punnette Square, you can see how half their children would have brown skin, while the other half would be white. It's not just theory, it's how my family is and lots others, like this family here. Really interesting stuff and, considering how mixed race marriages are rising, you'll see more mixed race kids.

So you can see how this fits in with the rebooted Storm family. Clearly one parent must be mixed race and another white. Assuming they're biological siblings with the same mother. Who knows, maybe they're step siblings or one or both are adopted . But, considering how confused the general public is regarding this, I really hope they are biologically related. It could prove to be an interesting teaching moment for everyone. And that would be great. Oh and it would be great if the movie didn't suck like the last two Fantastic Four movies.

Too Stupid Gamers site has launched

Of course the site has launched, you're reading this after all. It's odd how it took us over a year to form this. We're all prolific writers (I, myself, write several sentences each day. And that's not counting the two or three I have to do for work). Now we'll be able to combine our love of writing with video games.

That doesn't mean out channel is going anywhere. We're all busy and recording has gotten rare. This will allow us to deliver more editorial content to our fans when we can't get together. And there will still be video editorials. Jake and Dan are working on videos as we speak. Keep a look out for when those are posted, especially for Jake's Top 10 Video Game Chicks. 

For those of you who prefer reading over videos, we'll post our video along with transcripts here so you won't need to go to youtube (ugh, what loser would choose video over written content?). 

We're' still hammering away at what other unique content we should deliver. If there's anything you want to see, let us know in the comments.