I’m deliberately giving myself fewer of these this year, partly because I particularly don’t want to start the year feeling as if I’m already behind, so I’m trying to make the first quarter, at least, one in which I don’t have a pile of self-imposed tasks. So, this year, a shorter list of goals.
[more...]
I feel as if I did worse than usual on my goals for 2011, but that could be due to getting a bunch of them done early, with not many coming in the second half of the year.
[more...]
The last time the Magic: The Gathering World Championships were in San Francisco was September 2004. 2004 might have been the high water mark of my MTG career, and at one of the side events for that Worlds I racked up probably my best win, a two–one victory over Tsuyoshi Fujita with my Black/Red Death Cloud deck[*]. A month later I picked up my first (and, it seems, only) PTQ top eight result[†].
[more...]
While filling out background details for an upcoming episode of my D&D campaign, I came up with this town and its history, which I thought worth sharing. It’s strongly rooted in Q’Rith, but could easily be transplanted to another setting, and it looks promising to me as a potential base for a series of adventures, although I’m not sure I’ll actually use it as such.
It’s a harbor town of about 3000, far north of any other urban areas, independent, surrounded by sparsely-populated cold country, and run by a group of six, its founders.
[more...]
I started the process of building the world of Q’Rith, and the nature and politics of the area of it my campaign would be focused on, conceptually rather than visually, which is to say: I didn’t have a map.
I had a strong sense of how it was supposed to work in terms of the dynamics between regions, what the scale should be like, and of pieces of the history of the region. I also knew it would start on the east coast of a large continent, and that the continent’s dominant state would stretch from one coast to the other. But that was more or less all.
[more...]
Last week there was a significant amount of internet outcry over a post by Alyssa Bereznak about two dates she went on with Jon Finkel, a former Magic: The Gathering world champion. Bereznak called him out by name, and made clear that she had no interest in dating him because he was a former MTG world champion who still played the game. She also did more than that, and it’s the more that I’m looking at in this post—that, and how a defense of Bereznak by Sady Doyle at Tiger Beatdown misses the point and perpetuates the core problem with the original post.
[more...]
While getting ready to run the second season of my roleplaying campaign, I found myself with a question: several societies in the setting (based on this outline) are able to reliably navigate over vast oceans, but how are they able to do this?
[more...]
Dead End Thrills is a site collecting beautiful scenes from video games, mostly but not exclusively first-person shooters. They’ve had the HUDs stripped, so that nothing but the game world is visible; some of them have been viewed with custom textures or other modifications also—but, to my understanding, they’re not photoshopped or otherwise treated after being captured.
Some of my favorites:
Like Asteroids, but with better physics, and an upgrade system. Lots of fun, quite addictive, I highly recommend it: Space Rubbish. There’s a playable demo as well, which is also fun—one of my few quibbles with having bought the game is that the “arcade mode” of the demo isn’t available with the purchased game.
It’s cross-platform, and definitely worth the minimal amount the author is charging for it.
Most of you who need to know about Telehack doubtless already do, but you might have missed this interesting interview with its author by Andy Baio.
A year-and-a-half ago I wrote that Duke, the character, was “an ultimately invincible final boss”, one whose reputation prevented the publication of any less-than-perfect—therefore any—sequel. But I appear to have spoken too soon: Gearbox Software have announced that it’s gone gold.
I have no idea whether or not it’s any good. Is it possible for it to be good, now? Is it in any way possible for it to live up to expectations? Or has the presumption that it’s eternal vaporware made it a success regardless of how good it actually is?
I don’t know. It’s like some strange cultural artifact that at one time was possessed of great power and was then lost, for an age (10+ years in internet terms is “an age”, yes), and has now resurfaced. But has its power waned, like that of an old, half-forgotten god? Or has it merely been waiting until now, when the stars are right?
That’s right, the famous originally-iOS game is now available online for in-browser play, free. I think I prefer it in the browser, since I played through more of it last night at my desk than I have in the months of having it on my phone. The quality is good, and I’m impressed with how it runs. And it’s almost pure HTML5…
A to B is a simple physics/puzzle game built in processing.js. It’s not bad, and I’m happy to see games like this being made in JavaScript rather than Flash.
Note that you really have to read the instructions in order to beat level four.
Platformer fun with a cute, if deadly, twist: Soul Brother
I first recommended it almost three years ago, and it remains one of my favorite Flash games. Excellent simple gameplay with a retro feel, and with quite a lot of replay value. I hadn’t played it a while, though, partly because as a Flash game I felt it had a certain fragility; I couldn’t switch to playing it in another browser (or even browser profile), for example, without losing the progress I’d made, and that made me feel less invested in it after a time. (That, and I’d played through it almost entirely).
Now, however, pixeljam have come out with a standalone version. Dino Run SE is available for OS X, Windows, and Linux. I bought it this evening (the first game I’ve bought in a while) for the paltry price of $3. Even if I had no desire to play it again, I’d have paid them three bucks just for having developed the game in the first place. But getting a local version of it, which runs fullscreen and is also separated from my browser (and hence faster), makes it entirely worth it. You should pick it up.
If you haven’t seen this already, you should definitely watch it (assuming any interest in classic video games, that is).
Bits of this are just hilarious. The Pac-Man ghost-eating sound is probably my favorite.
This is a post about humor, taste, rape, offensiveness/offendedness, and limits on discourse, all centered on a three-panel webcomic about video games.
It’s rather long; I meant it as a tighter, more abstract, discussion of the points above, but got pulled into a lot of the specifics as I went through them.
[more...]
First up, Marshawn Lynch’s ridiculous run that sealed the crazy Seahawks upset of the Saints last weekend—with sound effects that, frankly, make the run more realistic to me than the version without them.
Last night I and my players finished the first story arc in my first roleplaying campaign in 15 years. I’m very happy to have done it, and will run the second arc later this year. I want to review what worked and what didn’t in the first arc.
[more...]