General

My Christmas gaming vacation continues with Crypt of the Necrodancer, a gift by a friend from my Steam wishlist. It’s a roguelike, but everything happens on the beat – movement, attacks, everything. The key to winning is to interpret the enemy dance and attack them when they’re unprepared. That green dragon is on the first level. My interpretive dance isn’t expressive enough to defeat him. Or something. But sometimes it’s not the dragon and I can descend. ...

Massive Chalice might just be the hardest tactical RPG I’ve ever played. Most RPGs let you take some heroes from novice to legend at your own pace. Massive Chalice takes that away from you. You might only get a chance to play them once or twice in their life, and maybe not at all. Your nation is being invaded on all sides by a creeping doom, which every so often forms itself into monsters that you must destroy. You, in this case, being an immortal dictator tasked with preserving the nation while an ancient artifact, the Massive Chalice, powers itself up to destroy the doom once and for all. ...

Google sent me my year in photos :) Didn’t expect this! Bridges, bikes, and my grandson. Sounds about right.Year in Photos 2014.m4v This was posted on Google+

I am officially done with my Christmas shopping! But look what I found at Toys “R” Us… Retro consoles pre-loaded with loads of the kind of arcade games I played when I was a lot younger. It doesn’t look like the Colecovision one has any place to put my old Colecovision cartridges.  This was posted on Google+

Welp, time to pull the trigger on Crushbone’s Revenge. You’ve heard me talking about this quest for months. It’s finally in a playable state. If any Neverwinter players want to give it a spin and let me know how they like it, I’d really appreciate it. It’s part of my EverQuest-in-Neverwinter campaign, but no knowledge of EverQuest is required to play. Crushbone’s Revenge (NW-DQY8XAH9D) by @Tipa It’s still in the For Review tab at the moment, but, I hope, will be in the “New” tab real soon. Need just one more review to get it out of Review Hell. ...

Took about forever to finish this book, but it was worth the read. Looking forward to the second half of the story with a mixture of anticipation and dread….a review of Pandora’s Star Wow, that was a thick book. Not long from now, humanity develops both instantaneous space travel via wormholes and immortality and spreads throughout the stars in a sort of t… This was posted on Google+

Maybe tomorrow I’ll spam all my recent Google+ posts.

I’m about to copy in all my posts from Ello. At first, I enjoyed writing to an audience of none, but … I can do that right here on my blog. It’s not all about games. I still play games, of course, all the time, but I don’t always (or even, often) have anything illuminating to say about them. I also will catch up on the writing for the online D&D 5e campaign, but that’s not written down anywhere. ...

Watched the first half of the first episode of Ascension last night. The premise is that, in the mid sixties, America launched an interstellar starship based on Orion technology in total secret to the stars, and now, 51 years later, their frozen-in-amber society is beginning to unravel. Orion worked by shooting nuclear bombs out the back, and plus such a large ship would be easily seen being built in orbit, not to mention lighting up the skies. 51 years would barely get it out of the solar system, still hundreds or thousands of years from getting to the nearest stars, none of which had been confirmed as having planets in the 60s. It wasn’t until the 80s that we could even confirm other stars even had planets. Plus apparently they have gravity control? The ship interior doesn’t look like there’s any support for acceleration or maneuvering? A puzzling plot line back on present-day Earth? ...

Weekly foundries!** First, a thanks to Cryptic for adding their rollable 20 sided die for in-game currency. Kasul and I were rolling for stealth and perception checks all night :) It was a small thing, but making something purely for fun, and cheap enough so everyone can have it, is just a really nice gesture in a free-to-pay game like Neverwinter. Only 70,000 AD in the Wondrous Bazaar. A heck of a lot of fun. ...