The Shrine

Not sure how many of you use or know about this service but it basically allows you to give money and provide start-up/continuation funds to people with business ideas. This could have gone in any of our forums but I've helped fund three things so far and they've all been games so I figured I'd put it up here. For some amount you can usually essentially pre-order the product and feel smug in the idea that you helped the product come into existence.

The first thing I helped fund was Wasteland 2 by inXile (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/wasteland-2) where they said if they managed to raise ~$2 million they would bring on Obsidian which I think between the two of them is a fairly large amount of the original people who worked on the first game. Unfortunately the fundraising cycle has ended so you have to wait for this thing to start getting marketed. They managed to raise nearly three million dollars. Not bad. Looking forward to this one even more since Mark Morgan (music for the original Fallout games and Planescape Torment) is on board. Too bad it's a year and a half away. This is the closest gamers as a group will ever get to come to playing a new Interplay game.

Yesterday I got bored and funded Drifter: A Space Trading Game (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cel ... ading-game) and Grim Dawn (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cra ... /grim-dawn). Drifter just seemed like a nice laid back exploration game.. where you trade things in space. It's really all in the title. In any case, it seemed right up my alley so I shot the guy enough for me to get in the early beta and a DRM free copy. Grim Dawn has had (apparently been in development for ~2 years) some of the Titan Quest developers working on it and while I haven't read the MASSIVE WALL OF TEXT that accompanies their Kickstarter page, I have been able to surmise that it's a hardcore, potentially unforgiving action RPG (read: Diablo clone). It looked neat and it was cheap. Why not?

If you've been on there what have you found?

Oh, and yes, Penny Arcade's comic was hilarious.

Oh I forgot to mention it's done through Amazon so you don't have to worry about giving some random asshole your credit card number.

I funded the new Shadowrun game, and I'm conflicted about having passed on Zombicide (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/coo ... /zombicide). $125 for a unknown property is just too big a risk. Far out, those miniatures look nice, though.

Yeah if I was in a position where I had people coming over to my house willing to play a game like that I'd probably have been more interested in Zombicide, as well. I backed a couple more things today. Some music (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ama ... k-and-tour) and another game (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/486 ... flaj-logan), but the game looks like it's not going to get enough funding.

I almost jumped on the Zombicide bandwagon, but I had already purchased a game that seemed somewhat similar a couple months ago.

http://www.amazon.com/Last-Night-On-Ear ... 747&sr=1-1

My buddy's band is trying to raise money through that site and it looks like they are making good progress:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hba ... -a-reality

They already self-funded one album, which was pretty good, and do have a fan base, so maybe they will make it and record a second one! (Its like adult alternative rock)

If only Sine could have kicked started that RPG he was workin on years ago.

Was probably going to buy this so getting in at the Kickstarter seemed like a good idea (pleasedontbeshit) http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/707 ... rvival-rpg

As you can tell by the URL it's a zombie survival RPG :D

Anarky wrote:I almost jumped on the Zombicide bandwagon, but I had already purchased a game that seemed somewhat similar a couple months ago.

http://www.amazon.com/Last-Night-On-Ear ... 747&sr=1-1

Ha! Yeah, that's a fun board game. We played a few rounds of that.

SineSwiper wrote:

Anarky wrote:I almost jumped on the Zombicide bandwagon, but I had already purchased a game that seemed somewhat similar a couple months ago.

http://www.amazon.com/Last-Night-On-Ear ... 747&sr=1-1

Ha! Yeah, that's a fun board game. We played a few rounds of that.

Purchased it for the Girlfriend and it is still in plastic wrap.... need to plan a game night.

Definitely jumped on this once I heard about it - a Defense Grid 2 Kickstarter

Speaking of which - I've come into a code that will give someone a free copy of Defense Grid and another code that gives all the DLC. For free. So anyone insane enough to have not already bought this game but wants to give it a try should let me know.

Project Eternity ( http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obs ... t-eternity ) looks pretty fun so I put in for that. Penny Arcade Report wrote better stuff than I could come up with about it http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/edit ... rnity-and-

Basically a Baldur's Gate-ish type of game.

I'm getting sick of reading Kickstarter updates that have something along the lines of "maybe not providing you guys with as many updates as you'd like." Don't people realize constant status updates are counter-productive and games can take 3+ months before any decent, reportable progress could/should be announced? People need to quit hounding them and let them work. Weekly, even monthly reports seem excessive to me. Really, expectations of transparency should be tempered unless you're one of the people who put in several thousand dollars.

Planescape: Torment is getting a spiritual successor from a great deal of the same people who put PST together. inXile is at the helm and Chris Avellone has given his thumbs up and says he expects good things from the team involved. The art looks amazing and like every Kickstarter Obsidian and inXile have put together the page is very well put together(http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inx ... f-numenera). Also like every Obsidian and inXile Kickstarter, it's barely a few days old and it already has well over a million dollars more than they were asking for. Looking forward to this more than any Kickstarter I've seen so far. The pitch video was also an enjoyable watch. Perhaps the second I've ever bothered watching all the way through.

I was just complaining about how I haven't seen anything I wanted on Kickstarter in months (last September it would seem) and then this appears.

I ended up backing a router called Almond+
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/203 ... smart-home

I've had my linksys WRT54GL forever now, so figured I'd back something with a wider feature set.