One of the more interesting things I saw at GDC09 occurred while I was attending the Experimental Gameplay session. I had walked in sometime after the session started and right at the beginning of a time-traveling RTS game by the name of Achron being presented.

My mind was blown.

The concept of Achron sounded really awesome, Christopher Hazard and Michael Resnick seemed to have figured out how to resolve allowing time travel in their game design and some of the examples shown and discussed were just amazing. I really wish there was video or at least another account of how in one game session, the flow of time were manipulated in such a way so that one player ended up nuking his own units. That sold me that I had to try this out one day, if Achron was released in any playable form.

That time has come, I caught (via Joystiq) this week that pre-orders are now being taken for Achron and that pre-ordering also nets you a download of the latest alpha release.

I think I’m going to have to give in and pre-order to try this out.

Even if you don’t like the RTS genre or don’t plan on playing it, at least do yourself the favor and check out what Christopher and Michael are doing with Achron — I think it’s fascinating.

No matter as Chris recently posted on Game|Life the results of that challenge and the resulting thread, where I happened to catch it. I think it was an awesome idea and challenge. For the tl;dr crowd, Chris challenged the J-GAF crew to hit up Japan’s amazing used game shops and see how much quality gaming they could get for under 1,000 Yen (just a hair under $11 as of right now).

WhiteAce, cvxfreak and BudokaiMR2 all came back with some pretty interesting results, even using some self-imposed guidelines and ratings analysis!

Over here in the US, Kyle Orland tried out the challenge over in Pittsburgh, with his set of rules and some pretty decent results! Kyle raised the spending cap to $20 to account for the fact that he felt that $10 wouldn’t really net you anything over here in the US. He also didn’t count sales tax (good move).

There’s also a Twitter hash tag (#1kyengamer) if you’re so inclined.

Of course, now I want to try this for myself over here on the West Coast sometime soon. I need to do some research first on where to go, as it would make for a much more interesting adventure to hit up as few corporate owned stores (GameStop and Game Crazy, et al.) as possible. There was a “Game Club” over on Western and 18th Street at some point that sounds like it would have been a prime spot, but it no longer exists.

Anybody from the LA metro area want to provide any good suggestions?

Anywhere LA Metro, but within the SFV/SGV boundaries and north of South Bay and OC — I don’t want to spend more on gas than I do in games right?

I’ll post my guidelines and results sometime later this month.