I don’t want to spoil the plot of the game, but essentially you’re a small robot in an industrial world, solving puzzles to navigate your way higher and higher through a city until… well, you’ll see.  There’s no dialogue in the game, but occasional cartoon-like thought bubbles provide the plot more than adequately.

The first thing that struck me about this game was how beautiful it was.  See that image over there?  That’s not concept art – that’s how it looks, the entire way through.  Machinarium feels like you’ve fallen into the pages of a storybook – and as someone who used to place dollhouse dolls on the pages of her books as a child, it’s much appreciated.

When I think about it, I don’t have the greatest track record for puzzle games.  As a child I loved games like Seventh Guest, but would inevitably hit a wall of frustration.  While there were certainly moments of staring blankly at the screen in Machinarium, it was not nearly so frustrating – in fact, for the most part, it’s quite intuitive.  I played it with a partner (something I highly recommend; two minds are better than one) and the two of us constantly asked one another, “Well, why don’t we try this?” or “What could we do with that?”

In a move to lure pirates into actually buying their game, Machinarium currently costs around $5 to download (but on Aug 12 that ends).  In my opinion it’s well worth the half-day+ of entertainment.  I didn’t know about this Pirate Amnesty sale until I’d already bought the game, but now I’m glad I had the added bonus of supporting an independent game developer.  There’s a demo you can try – and, if you’re like me, it will be more than enough to get you hooked.  I might even play it again, on my own, just to immerse myself in that gorgeous world again.

Have any of you tried Machinarium?  What are your thoughts?  And are there similar games I should try (I’ve already played and love Braid)?

Imagine your dream store, catering to one of your favorite pastimes. The shop is full of nothing but creative goodness. Aisle upon aisle of things just waiting, hoping you’ll purchase them, take them home, and use them to their full potential. Some items are great for beginners, wanting to try something new but needing a lot of guidance in the beginning. Others are for the more experienced, and in the hands of someone who really knows what they’re doing can become wondrous and magical. Absolutely everything piques the imagination, and whets the appetite of a creative soul.

Are you picturing your friendly local gaming store? You easily could, but my description could also be of your friendly local craft store!

Crafts are prime geek hobbies. Geeks are a creative bunch, after all. Look at the hours upon hours we put into developing character background for our RPG characters (or that a GM puts into their campaign!). Who hasn’t thought of a different ending for Serenity, or an X-Men story arc involving only our favorite characters (some characters aren’t dead in my Marvel Universe, yo), even if we don’t go as far as putting it down on paper as fan fiction? If you’ve ever painted a D&D mini or put together your own cosplay outfit, you’ve already got one foot in the door toward becoming a crafty geek.

Since the best hobbies are the ones that can feed your other hobby needs, let’s take a look at just a few of the fun crafts that can be used to accentuate your current geekdom.

Models

Painting Warhammer minis and building terrain for battlefields makes for an easy transition to putting together models. Besides looking cool (which they do), models can be used in a game to serve as superb visualization of the party’s current location. Look beyond the Millennium Falcon and U.S.S. Enterprise kits available at the game store – hobby shops have kits for cars and planes (D20 Modern, anyone?), trains (Steampunk!),  and ships, among others. I recently played in a homebrew game set on the Titanic, and one of my fellow players brought in a model of the ill-fated ship that his father had made for him. We all thought it added a lot to the game, as instead of trying to describe to us where the second-class dining hall was, the GM was able to simply point to the model and say, “You are here.”

Sewing

Cosplaying can be a seriously expensive hobby. Custom-made costumes can cost an arm and a leg (and let’s not even talk about the shipping if your seamstress or tailor is in Japan!), and it’s even more heartbreaking when you get the costume and something about it still doesn’t fit right, or look right (“Sango’s armor is black and pink, not black and red! ARGH!”). The solution? Learn to sew.

Those of us who took Home Economics in high school may have some bad memories of, say, misshapen stuffed animals and sweatshirts with crooked seams. *whistles innocently* You have to purge those memories. Home Ec. teachers are working with a slew of students who would rather be anywhere than at a sewing machine, and said machines are old, cantankerous, and difficult to work with.

Today’s sewing machines are slick and easy to use, and a good one can be purchased new for under $200 (mine sews at the touch of a button – no foot pedal needed!). Most larger craft stores, like JoAnn and Hobby Lobby, as well as locally owned shops offer sewing classes for very reasonable fees, but you can teach yourself by reading the manual that comes with your machine, watching online tutorials, and picking up sewing books at the bookstore. Fabric and sewing notions can be pricey, but if you get on the coupon mailing lists for craft stores and watch their sales, you can get lots of goodies for just a little money.

Beyond sewing costumes, you can make lots of other things – bags for lugging your game books, cool curtains for your bedroom, and “normal” clothes – plus you can mend and alter existing items. So you can sew up the ripped seam on your nice dress pants for your day job (a spool of thread costs around two bucks), and spend the money you would have used for new pants on a video game instead. Awesome.

Embroidery and Cross-Stitch

Hand embroidery sometimes gets a bad rap, and with the plethora of sickly-sweet-cute Precious Moments cross-stitch patterns and dancing tomatoes on dish towels out there, it’s no wonder. The good news is, embroidery patterns have come a long way, baby. Sublime Stitching (“This ain’t your gramma’s embroidery!”) has patterns for everything from cute little wiener dogs and space robots to Mucha Lucha masks and zombies (yes, zombies!). Spend a few minutes (or hours…oops) searching on Etsy, and you’ll find all sorts of fun patterns for cross-stitch and embroidery alike. A quick browse through the cross-stitch kits at the craft store will reveal some gorgeous wizards, unicorns, and other fantasy scenes. I even own a book with a CD-ROM entitled Manga Cross-Stitch.

The even better news? You can turn anything you want into an embroidery pattern with dressmaker’s carbon paper, a transfer pen, or even a good ol’ mechanical pencil. You can also turn any image into a cross-stitch pattern; there’s special software available, but a quick internet search will turn up a couple different ways to do it in Photoshop or whatever photo-processing software you use.

With just needle and thread, you can decorate your clothing or anything else made of fabric in your home. Make pillows with cross-stitched Horde and Alliance symbols. Make a family crest for your Pathfinder character and hang it in your game room. Embellish your newborn’s onesies with beholders! The possibilities are endless. And it’s easy. If you can sew on a button, you can embroider or cross-stitch.

Crocheting and Knitting

Knitters and crocheters are geeks in their own right, though I don’t know how many would admit it. Hook and needle preferences closely resemble dice superstition. The specs for a project read like the stats on a character sheet. And if you’ve ever heard one of us having a nerdgasm over yarn…well, that pretty much settles it.

Yarn crafts have been experiencing an upswing in popularity lately, and it’s easier than ever to learn. “Teach yourself” kits and classes are available at craft stores, there are more books out there than you can shake a stick at, and YouTube is full of instructional videos that experienced needleworkers have made to help the masses.

What can you knit or crochet that’s geeky? Seriously? What can’t you? You can make dice bags that are super soft and keep your luckiest d20s safe and sound. There isn’t much cuter than a plushie Cthulhu monster. Do you cosplay? The internet abounds with patterns for Weasley sweaters (there’s even been a book published of nothing but Harry Potter-inspired patterns), cunning Jayne Cobb hats, and Dr. Who scarves. Why pay the big money for that stuff when you can make it yourself?

I could go on and on about other crafts, but you get the picture. Craftiness and geekiness can not only co-exist, they can be one and the same. If you haven’t already ventured into the world of crafts, don’t be afraid! There’s lots of fun to be had, cool stuff to be made, and all sorts of new things to obsess about and geek out over.

How about you?

What types of crafty geeking out do you do? Feel free to link us to your website or Etsy store, too. We’d love to check out your geeky creations.

I was utterly fascinated.  I had grown up with dollhouses and Barbies, and it always seemed like the coolest bits were the details, the miniature bits that were “just like the real thing.” The more realistic, the better.  This dollhouse museum had all that on a scale I had never seen before.  Instead of an orange generic plastic soda bottle, here were tiny cans of Pepsi.  Tiny boxes of diapers, brand names.  I bought a copy of The Vampire Lestat that was less than an inch tall – and you could open it to individual pages.

These tiny houses with real electrical wiring – it was an immersive world.  And soon, depsite my fascination, I began to feel a little claustrophobic.  I wasn’t quite sure what, exactly, was the problem – I just had this feeling that it was a path to an obsession that had no limit.  I was somewhat relieved to leave the little museum, and live in the real world, not one that was a painstakingly recreated ersatz.

Since then, I’ve encountered a couple of other movements that seem really interesting, but that I’ve held at bay due to that same claustrophobic feeling.  One is the steampunk aesthetic: gorgeous stuff, fascinating to think about, almost like a fantasy world that you can actually create.  And I just know that if I were to tread a little deeper, I’d have an endless stream of projects, forever hunting for this or that object.

The other is retro renovation.  I love the mid-century aesthetic; when I was little I wanted to have the kitchen from the 1940s segment of the Carousel of Progress.  With antique and junk stores, it’s not as difficult as you might think to bring your kitchen, your bathroom, your entire life back to 1950s glory.

But it’s easy for me to get carried away.  Do I want this blender because it’s superior, or because it’s vintage?  Wouldn’t I rather want to find a modern blender with the design elements I like?  One that, you know, works?

Movements like these are sort of like losing yourself in a novel with a richly created world.  Maybe because I’ve always been looking forward to The Future, and loving the era I’m in, I’m wary of immersing myself too much into something else – the past, or a world that’s altogether fiction.

Am I the only one who gets that claustrophobic feeling from time to time?  What other immersive pastimes and movements can you think of?

See, I grew up in Orlando.  I’ve been going to Disney World since I was three years old.  It was a rite of passage for many teens to work there, and most rewards or field trips involved trips to Disney.  Most people in Orlando have a love/hate relationship with WDW, but for me, it’s mostly love.  Add that to the typical immersion of a young girl into all things Disney, and my penchants for trivia and history, and well, I’m hooked.  I have a strong opinion about just about everything Disney, from merchandising to Imagineering decisions to, um, corporate leaders.

Thus, you can imagine how excited I really am when I say I absolutely cannot wait for Epic Mickey.

What is Epic Mickey, you ask?  It was first hinted at, months and months ago, as a game featuring a sort of post-apocalyptic Disney World.  Images of a crumbling Spaceship Earth (the EPCOT ball to most) had minds reeling.

Now we know a little bit more:  It’s a single-player game, designed only for the Wii.  It’s apparently mostly platform, part RPG.   The post-apocalyptic world is actually the Cartoon Wasteland, a sort of world for ideas that were rejected or simply forgotten… and, thanks to an evil force, it’s… not quite right.

Gameplay promises to be relatively novel and free-form for a platform; since you use paint and paint thinner to navigate the levels, there’s several ways to paint your way out of corners, as it were.  There’s also a morality system: you can be a Scrapper, aggressive and frightening to other characters, or a Hero, who creates more than she destroys.

Most exciting is the artistic direction the game seems to be taking.  Disney is normally pretty stingy about using Mickey, and as a result, Mickey has kind of faded into a symbol with very little personality.  Epic Mickey is intended to be the start of a relaunch of Mickey; he promises to be a little more feral, a little less polished, and hopefully more relevant.

I’ve also read that the storyline for the game will make the minds of Disney and animation buffs explode with joy.  Hardly any of the characters are modern; most will harken back to cartoons that hardly any of us have seen.  Oh, and did I mention a major character is Oswald the Lucky Rabbit?  Many might know of him as the precursor to Mickey.  I might know that bit of trivia, but I guarantee that there will be other characters that I haven’t even heard of.

I haven’t heard as much about how many WDW elements will actually make it into the game and how many were just concept art, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed.  Many of the original Disney rides weren’t based on a film at all, or have very distinct personalities from their source material.  Pirates of the Caribbean, Small World, Haunted Mansion, the Carousel of Progress, Skyway… these all have potential in the right hands.

Epic Mickey isn’t supposed to come out until September of this year.  That’s a long time to wait (I’m hoping Cataclysm for WoW will be released and distract me in the meantime).  Still, you can bet that as more info is released in the meantime, I’ll be gobbling it up, eagerly waiting.