It was brought to my attention just a little while ago that Amazon this week is holding a super crazy video game deal (see post title). From Oct. 26-31, if you spend $80 on select games (good games too, new and old), they’ll give you $40 game credit on your next purchase. Now, if you’re the savvy gamer, you will also know that Modern Warfare 2, coming out in two weeks, gives you a $20 game credit upon pre-ordering. Also, Assassin’s Creed II at Amazon gives you $10. In the end, you could use this pseudo Reaganomics to trickle-down these game credits to upcoming games for big savings.

For this gamer, I plan on picking up Demon’s Souls and Uncharted 1 for a total of $83, then grabbing MW2, then AC II, then using the last $10 on New Super Mario Bros Wii for the marathon. Win!

There’s one catch on the MW2 deal, however. While the $40 ends Oct. 31st, Amazon doesn’t mail the game rebate codes for seven days after the game has shipped. If you want to be positive that you’ll get the $40 in time for MW2, make sure you buy into the deal as soon as possible. I don’t know if/when the $20 game credit that comes with MW2 will end, so it’s best to play it on the safe side.

The Amazon games deal can be found here.

Last night we tried out our video software and connection to make sure everything would roll smoothly for the event and the results are in: It all works! Let’s take some time to cheer on behalf of all of us! We’re essentially done with all of the prep for the event, although there still are some small details to work out. If we’re going to shoot for 72+ hours, we’ll need some more entertainment than just the video game and commentary, and that’s exactly what we’re working on. So stay tuned for more information regarding that, and thanks to everyone who viewed the show last night and helped us test things out!

This passed Monday we had planned on riling up cavalier group of gamers to test out our video software and streaming quality. Unfortunately, one of them became sick over the weekend, and since his computer was to be used to stream the game(s), we had to cancel. Hopefully soon we’ll be able to test this out soon, after he gets over his swine-pneumonia or whatever it is.

In other news, most of the Mario games we plan on playing have been acquired and are ready to go. This is not really that difficult, as most of them were simply downloaded onto the Wii, but it’s nice to be one step closer to having everything completed for the event. It’ll be exciting, I tell ya’. Right now I think we lack Super Mario World 2 and New Super Mario Wii – as it hasn’t been release yet. So close!

This inaugural post serves to not only test to make sure all the gears are turning but also to say how excited our group is to not only participate in something like this but for the future prospects as well. After our first marathon in December, if all goes well (and even if it doesn’t), we plan on doing this on a fairly regular basis. We were conversing earlier about the event, brainstorming on ideas for our secondary cam stream, and this equation ended up defining the whole idea:

Video games + charities = AWESOME

That pretty much covers it. So to end this first post, we’ll just say thanks for coming to the site and we look forward to seeing everyone during the marathon!