I fondly remember Gold Mine Comics in Victoria, TX during my youth. Magic the Gathering was a new card game that took off with amazing speed and the store set up a game room in the back where you could play this addicting card game from open to close. At any given time, there were between four and fourteen people back there battling it out with their custom decks and debating the best builds.

Back then, the most expensive card I had ever seen was the elusive and rare Mox Jet card. It was priced at $100.00 and making $20.00 every two weeks as my allowance my dreams of owning such an amazing card were drowned out by my relentless need for more cards of any power or rarity so my decks were usually full of atogs and other weakling creatures.

As time went on, expansions were released and editions were updated. Arabian Nights was the first major expansion of MTG which was followed by updated core releases roughly four times a year since the first. The rules have been updated several times and the current rule set in play is Magic 2010 released in July of 2009.

MTG has also spread their reach in to the online realm as well including Magic the Gathering Online or Magic Online for short. In MTG Online, you are able to buy virtual cards and play them online with friends and random opponents. You can also trade, build custom decks and even take part in tournaments online. While many of the game’s avid followers have moved to the online version, many traditionalists prefer the face-to-face game play that having decks on hand gives you.

Magic also has an independent video game featuring pre-made decks out called Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers. This game features challenges both offline and online with NPC and real life opponents. Though you can’t make a custom deck of your own, you are able to play with the pre-created decks and use strategy to overcome your opponents rather than rely on having the most expensive deck to gain victory.

Magic the Gathering has been around for almost 20 years and thanks to modern technology and a refreshed interest, it appears that this collectible card game is going to be around for a long time to come.

Our first tip is taking the time out to train learning skills. This class of skills allows you to learnn faster making your transition from noob to master as short as possible. Take some time out and learn as many of these skills as you can. Though their impact isn’t immediately apparent, spending time on them can cut all of your future skill training times in half. One month of learning skill training can give you an extra five month lead on someone that didn’t over the next year.

The next tip for the skill training impaired is to use the 24 hour skill training queue. When Eve Online was young players had to be careful to be available when skill training completed. This meant either delaying certain skills until their timing worked out for you or waking up at 3:00am to change skills. Thankfully, Eve responded to overwhelming demand for change by implementing a 24-hour skill training queue. This allows you to queue up skill training changes for the next 24 hours allowing you to login at any time that day to set skill changes for the next. With skill training in Eve Online, every second counts.

There is also a very healthy amount of third party applications out there to assist you in planning your character’s future skill training. They can do this by creating a virtual shopping list of skills in order to meet requirements needed to mount certain upgrades on your ships, fly the ships and even aid in your particular professions. Our favorite third party skill training application here at dailypwn.com studios is EveMon. This program not only helps you plan your character training out, but also gives you several tools to aid in mining, equipment fitting and more.

Whatever your chosen profeession inside the corporate space game known as Eve Online, remember to concentrate on the future when considering your training selections. Learning skills will help you get where you need to go faster no matter what you decide to do. The queue will assist you in making sure every second counts. Training skills is time intensive and often frustrating, but it doesn’t have to be overwhelmingly difficult to plan.

PookyMedia:

http://www.pookymedia.com/

The 1st Question:

http://treet.tv/shows/1stquestion

Music provided by Derek K. Miller:

http://www.penmachine.com/

An edited video version of this podcast will be available on our weekly TV show: Daily PWN Weekly Review coming out 05/10/2010.

Graphics in this game are unusually limiting. There really isn’t a way to set a resolution beyond switching from full screen to windowed mode. The game looks great though the graphics are what you would expect from a typical flash game on any number of websites out there.

In fact, Elf Bowling is available on many of the flash websites out there either in download form or a limited play form. A free demo is even available that lets you play the game for one hour in order to give it a try. We found this title for a couple dollars on Steam.

What makes this bowling game especially different from all the others is their system of advantages and disadvantages you can use to help you. By rolling your ball over coin-shaped pieces on the alley, you can gain advantages during your next turn such as a bigger ball, a rocket that guarantees a strike if you aim it correctly, a rock ball that splits and makes you immune to oil slicks and others. You can also sabotage your opponent using oil slicks, gravel that grinds their ball down in size, barricades that block the ball and knock it in the gutter and many others. These extras make for a wacky kind of bowling that breaks the traditional bowling game monotony.

The elves constantly shout phrases that directly reference annoying Internet memes such as “Chocolate Rain”. They do this to intimidate and annoy you and it works, especially when they pass gas at you as you get ready to take your turn. Their voices remind me of Foamy cartoons which is another Internet sensation.

Controls are simple. You move your cursor left or right to set up your stance, hold down and push your mouse to set your speed and power and continue aiming as the ball makes its way down the isle. You have control of your ball from start to finish which comes in handy when your opponent uses dirty tricks like setting up a giant magnet.

Overall, the experience is exceptional for the price. I intended to play the game for about an hour and three hours later decided that this one will be in rotation at our house for some time to come.

Some shapes are intelligent and move away from your line of fire while others wiggle their way around randomly. Your job is to survive inside a restricted play area for as long as possible while taking out as many opponents as you can. It’s simple and fun or as they put it, “Retro Evolved.”

Graphics couldn’t be more simple. Everything is wire frame and only a few minor effects here and there hint that development happened in the past two decades. Explosions are plentiful and tend to fill your screen as you wipe out opponents with a sweep of your mouse.

You can fire on opponents using your standard blaster or opt for an area attack occasionally when threatened from all sides. There really isn’t a lot to learn so the learning curve is little to none.

Sound effects aren’t epic though they are very well placed. They don’t sound as retro as the game looks and for that reason alone Geometry Wars has earned a few points with us at The Daily PWN. The musical soundtrack is good enough to not only make you think twice about muting it in exchange for your own tunes, but crank it up loud enough to really enjoy.

Overall, Geometry Wars is a great title available at a low price via Steam and other fine downloading services. Bizarre Creations has really created a sleeper hit with this title and I believe it deserves a lot more credit than it has received from the overall gaming community.

Gameplay is smooth and fun on both the Mac and PC versions. Penguins Arena is a first person shooter and there isn’t much making it any different than any other shooter out there game wise. You can respawn and eventually return as a ghost with the ability to help your surviving team mates or hurt your remaining opponents until the end of the round.

The object is to push your opponents off the arena space using snowballs and avoid being struck hard enough to lose your stance on land as well. If you fall in the water sharks are waiting to take you out of the round until your respawn or ghostly return.

Graphics aren’t overwhelming though they are comical and intentionally so. The graphics fit the overall theme of the game and for that reason there really isn’t any faulting the developers.

Every purchase of Penguins Arena helps fund KIVA.org which provides loans to unique entrepreneurs in developing countries to help lift them out of poverty. It’s a person-to-person micro-lending website.

Overall, the game is fun for all ages. It features cheesy graphics and a silly storyline though it proves itself addictive to even the hardcore gamer.

Geo-Defense has amazing sounds and big explosions. It’s simple and easy to understand. The game reminds me of Tron and not in a bad way. One very positive aspect is once you leave the game using the home button, your place is saved and picked up when you load it back up. This makes Geo-Defense a solid app for use when you just need to kill a few minutes.

As we enter Inventor Mode, or single-player, we are greeted with a list of puzzles to tackle. They get increasingly difficult and unlock as you gain star points. The basic function of each puzzle is to connect one object to another through using pipes, gears and other mechanical tools. The goal can range from ringing a bell to blowing up a baloon or turning a giant wheel on at the end of the puzzle. Further down the line, you can even make rockets blast off.

This game closely reminded me of the hacking puzzles in Bioshock or that boring little picture puzzle on the Windows Vista Sidebar. They’re simple displacement puzzles some on a two dimensional plane and others span across a multi-surface cube requiring you to keep the link going across all sides. This game is indeed challenging and would make for a great experience for children and adults alike.

The sound track is soothing to the point of being sleep inducing so unless you’re playing right before bed you may want to opt to exchange the game music with your own. Speaking of music, a version of Cogs is set for release on the iPhone and iPod Touch in January of 2010.

Overall, Cogs is playable by just about anyone from any age group. It is a worthy challenge to even the most clever of minds and a great tool for working out your logic skills. It is both fun and educational which is a rare combination to find in widely distributed game titles.