geekosystem

This week in Editors' Picks: A goodbye, a return, and a correctly spelled Vally.

We knew it was coming, but now we know when. BioWare's attempt at a Star Wars MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic, will be going free-to-play starting next week, Thursday, November 15. The game released on December 20 of last year, and a little less than one year later, is making the move to a free-to-play model, like most of the rest of the MMO market. Makes you wonder why any MMO developers think their game can launch without a free-t0-play option nowadays.

1. 11 notable Doctor Who fans (Mental Floss)
2. Cool tech from Bond (GeekSugar)
3. Can teeth heal themselves? (Environmental Graffiti)
4. Thief picks pockets with chopsticks (HyperVocal)
5. Turn your TV into a 50-inch Android smartphone (The Daily Dot)
6. 5 awesome movie robots with inexcusable design flaws (Cracked)
7. Extremely serious photos of silly actors (Flavorwire)

(title pic via Daily Picks and Flicks)

Created by The Eco Experts in an attempt to show how easy it is to install solar panels, this stop-motion LEGO video does just that, and warms our cold, jaded hearts in the process. Look at how adorable solar panels are, guys! It's like having a puppy nailed to your roof and powers your household.

It's a cold, dreary Thursday, and now that Daylight Saving Time has hit, you can add "dark way too early" to your Thursday adjectives. So, to brighten up (or ruin, we guess) your day, we wanted to let you know that this taxidermy squirrel with a cowboy hat riding a rattlesnake exists.

1. The terrifying origin of "Drinking the Kool-Aid" (Mental Floss)
2. 5 reasons to get into Grooveshark (GeekSugar)
3. The breathtaking colors of Iceland (Environmental Graffiti)
4. The most offensive things you can buy on eBay (HyperVocal)
5. Is YouTube making us smarter? (The Daily Dot)
6. 6 iconic movie scenes that happened by accident (Cracked)
7. Where are '90s teen TV characters now? (Flavorwire)

(title pic via Daily Picks and Flicks)

If you've ever played a JRPG, you might've noticed that your characters have stomachs that work similarly to the Doctor's TARDIS -- bigger on the inside. With their usual inventory with infinite space, it's not entirely odd --relative to the game's universe -- that they'd be able to shove 99 heal potions down their gullet, but the always-impressive team at Corridor Digital are here to show us what would happen if you quaffed all those heals and buffs in real life.

In an Activision earnings call earlier today, Blizzard honcho Mike Morhaime crushed all of our hopes and dreams and noted that the second third of StarCraft II, Heart of the Swarm, will miss 2012 and release sometime in the early part of 2013.

1. The space-faring rubber chicken (GeekSugar)
2. When Victoria's Secret rescued the National Guard (Mental Floss)
3. Top 10 GIFs from election night (The Daily Dot)
4. Pacemaker powered by heartbeat (The Week)
5. 5 insane farm secrets behind the food on your grocery list (Cracked)
6. Macabre little people invade Vienna (Environmental Graffiti)
7. Playing games won't be the first thing you do on the Wii U (Geek.com)

(title pic via Daily Picks and Flicks)

It almost seems too good to be true, but Steam for Linux is finally in a tangible form, and the beta is available now. The service only provides a couple dozen games at the moment, but it does offer some other neat features, one of which we didn't expect right away.

It's been a very long time coming, but if you're a Battlestar Galactica fan, you've known about the web series, Blood and Chrome, for quite some time. The series follows William Adama during the first First Cylon War, something we only saw for a clip or two in flashbacks on SyFy's Battlestar Galactica. After many delays and reworks, the series will finally debut on Machinima Prime this Friday.

1. Will video games impact voter turnout? (Mediaite)
2. Political insiders to follow on Twitter today on election day (GeekSugar)
3. Awesome election day stickers on Canvas (The Daily Dot)
4. 25 presidential facts for killing time at the polls (Mental Floss)
5. The best and worst Bond themes of all time (Flavorwire)
6. 6 unspoken rules of public transportation (Cracked)
7. 10 worst airship disasters in history (Environmental Graffiti)

(title pic via reddit)

We all shed a tear when game design genius Fumito Ueda left Team ICO, and it was even worse that it happened in the middle of the development of their next game, The Last Guardian. We've been waiting on the game's release for around three years now, and it seems we're not much closer to knowing when that is. In an interview with French website Jeux Video, boss of Sony Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida said that no one could promise any release date for the game.

If you're either one of those gamers that loves retro games, or you just really dig collecting odd gaming gadgets, At Games is sprucing up their line of devices that house multiple older games with the new, dramatically named Ultimate Portable Game Player. The unit houses 40 Sega Genesis games, and 40 "arcade" games, which could mean anything.

Anyone who has gotten an SSD with the requisite smaller storage space currently inherent to the medium and installed Windows 7 on it knows damn well that Microsoft operating systems take up too much space. When Microsoft released their new tablet, the Surface, people were thrilled that the base model started with 32 GB of free space. Unfortunately, due to the pre-installed software on the device, the 32 GB storage size is more like 16 GB.