Dice

I refuse to believe that any day that begins with finding your dice, can be a bad day. Those blurry bits of plastic saw me through a lot of hard times. Not long ago, I’d have sat right down, pulled out a clean character sheet and rolled up an adventurer. When I found these while packing this morning, my first thought was: I gotta put these in my blog! ...

February 21, 2006 · 3 min · 448 words · Tipa

Babylon 5 - I've Found Her

Busy day in the blog… Years ago, Sierra was making a Babylon 5 game. It looked slick. I upgraded my computer so I would be able to play it. I loved Wing Commander, and I loved B5, so this game looked perfect… and then it was canceled. Fans decided not to let it go that easily, and made their own based on the Homeworld engine (I played Homeworld. It was okay. I got to the second-to-last mission and just abandoned it.) ...

January 10, 2006 · 1 min · 208 words · Tipa

Wasn't "Gil" Their First?

FF12’s First Tie-In Product Restores real-life hit points! Now I won’t have to go into stranger’s homes and open up all their chests for Potion.

December 1, 2005 · 1 min · 25 words · Tipa

Text Adventures

I saw this Wall Street Journal on Modern-day Text Adventures on Slashdot. That brings me back - way back - to 1979 and the computer clusters at the University of New Hampshire. Someone had installed ADVENT on the DEC-10s - that’s what we called Crowthers’ “Collosal Cave” adventure. To say that changed my life would be understating things. It sparked an interest in programming that destroyed my chance of happiness at electrical engineering. I wanted to write games like that. And I did - HOUSE (a fantasy game set around my Concord home), TG2 (The Game 2 [sigh]), ROOM (a dungeon crawl with ANSI graphics that presaged my introduction to Rogue-like games, my contributions to Nethack… ...

November 15, 2005 · 2 min · 272 words · Tipa

FF XII preview

A really nice preview of Final Fantasy 12 at 1UP. Like FFXI, but on a console? I loved the look and play of FFXI (except for the bits that really bugged me. And the people.) I’m excited to see if FFXII can match that.

November 11, 2005 · 1 min · 44 words · Tipa