Cheap Date: August 15th

For some of you it is pay day and that money is burning a hole in your pocket, but you do not know what you want to spend your money on. You have come to right place. Here on Cheap Date, I will give a couple of recommendations on how to spend $30 on nerdy entertainment for the week.

Hit the jump for all my lovely recommendations

I never understood why there are such dry periods in the months of summer. I mean, there are always good movies and comics coming out but everything else seems to be put on hold for the fall or pre-Christmas. But this week, there were a lot of things that I wanted to recommend but had to whittle it down to just a few items. I guess that happens when you are trying to be cheap. So if you do not agree with my recommendations, trust me that there are a lot more to choose from this week.

Movies – $11

ParaNorman

ParaNorman comes from the same production company, Laika Entertainment, that brought us Coraline; so we know that they can handle stop-motion clay-animation. In fact, they handled it brilliantly with Coraline. I’m a sucker for traditional animation. While this movie may not have the backing of a Neil Gaiman original story, from the trailers it seems that the movie has all the charm and spunk that I think will make this a quirky, enjoyable movie.

As much nostalgia Expendables 2 will bring me, I would rather see something original and light-hearted this weekend.

Comics – $2.99

Wonder Woman #12

If you have not been reading DC Comics’ Wonder Woman by writer Brian Azzarello and artist Cliff Chiang, then you are missing one of the best series ever to grace the medium.

Maybe I’m wrapped up in the hype, but I have not had this much fun reading a female led comic since the Palmiotti-Gray-Conner run on Power Girl.

This issue seems to go to its superhero roots as Wonder Woman is about to have a throw down with the god Apollo. I can not wait to see the art Chiang comes up with to render this slugfest. Then of course, Azzarello has to bring it back to the horror-mythology story as we see the birth of an offspring of Zeus. And who knows how that will turn out.

Special Treat: For the next 15 hours, you can go to Tanga to grab a year’s subscription for $12.99. That will make it about $1.09 per issue. Other DC Comics series are on sale as well.

Games – $15 or more

Planetary Annihilation

Uber Entertainment, creators of Monday Night Combat and the free-to-play Super Monday Night Combat, have decided to take their turn at Kickstarter which gives us Planetary Annihilation. Planetary Annihilation will be Uber’s take on RTS, or real-time strategy for you neophytes. From the trailer and screenshots on the Kickstarter page, you can see that the wonderful art style they developed in MNC will have influence here. It will be a bit cartoony but still awesome. There are not many great RTS games out there and even fewer that would support the game with constant updates. If SMNC has shown the world anything, it’s that Uber can give a great game for a low price and continue supporting with updates and tweaks.

You will not see this game come out quite yet (you basically pre-order the game), so if you need a more immediate fix then you may want to check out the Humble Bundle (Just released today. The games are Android based, but they have a few that have Steam-redeemable codes.) or you may even want to grab the brand new Darksiders 2.

That will be it for this week. Hopefully, you enjoy everything I recommended. Feel free to comment what you thought of these suggestions or if you have something else that you think would be a better fit. See you all next week for another edition of Cheap Date.