Sunday Almanac: Not at Gamescom Edition

Attendees at the first Gen Con in 1968. The nerds of 1968 would be the coolest kids in Shoreditch or Brooklyn today.

I’m not at Gamescom in Germany this week — or at the similarly named, counter-programmed Gen Con in Indiana. I would have loved to have been at one or the other, but Lady F and I have got a wedding to attend at the end of the week. My significant other is not one to miss a wedding because there’s a board game convention on.

Now this is going to be a pretty great wedding but I still lament not attending because like Will.i.am, I’ve got a feeling. A feeling that something really excellent is going to be announced this week. Obviously there will be a lot of video games revealed at Gamescom and Gen Con, but something tells me that we’ll have a notable for our particular wavelength on the gaming spectrum. Maybe it’s going to be a new iOS title from Firaxis, who have been awfully quiet on the mobile front after a busy 2013 – remember that they didn’t have a hand in Civ Rev 2. Or maybe it’ll be the long-rumoured tablet edition of Fantasy Flight’s Android Netrunner that I’ve been hearing whispers about for the past year.

I don’t know. This is all just a hunch. But here at PT HQ we’ll be sleeping one eye up this week.

Sunday links below.

• Next door at RDBK, Phil reveals that classic “gold box” RPG label SSI (creators of Eye of the Beholder and the exacerbaters of much myopia in the 1990s) are getting back together.

• And that’s not the only classic video game imprint on the rebound: Activision is thawing out Sierra at Gamescom this week. At Kotaku, the sensible Luke Plunkett worries that Sierra will be a foul chariot for more free-to-play crap, but I’m hoping it’s not to much to hope that it will return as a premium mobile adventure games label. Oh, that is too much to hope? Shit.

• Speaking of free-to-play shenanigans, this Vox dissection of the psychology of Vegas slot machines should be familiar reading for us. (This piece via Moomanibe.)

• A more hopeful bulletin: noted makers of free-to-play casual shovelware Game Insight have announced a newfound embrace of core games. I asked their PR reps about this last week and they said that a variety of premium (non-F2P-driven) price points were being considered.

• An always-timely reminder.