Other Games

Every couple of weeks I buy something cheap and fun on Steam. Transistor a few weeks ago, Mirror’s Edge the week before last, Injustice: Gods Among Us last week. This week’s game is Little Racers STREET. I’ve loved top down racers since the first one I played back at the dawn of the arcade era. A monochrome race where blocky cars would go around a really simple track and sometimes oil would spin you out. At the height of the arcade era, top down racers had become faster, more colorful, with powerups and shortcuts and pounding music. I used to wait for takeout pizza playing this game (and if I could remember the name of it, I’d link it). (Oh, apparently it is called Super Sprint). ...

My "Murloc Deck" about to go to work Finally – FINALLY! – got into the Hearthstone beta last night. I’ve been looking forward to this game since… well, probably since I stopped playing Wizard101. Deck construction was always the part I liked best about that game. Always having that perfect card available. Welcoming additional players in my circle because the more enemies, the sweeter the victory. That was all training day stuff compared to Hearthstone, though. Though not up to the complexity of severely tactical games such as Magic: the Gathering, there’s still quite a lot of depth. I’ll have to get my son’s take on it. He was big into CCGs back in the day, Yu-Gi-Oh mainly. ...

Redshirts title screen It was Galaxy Quest that first codified for me the sad fate of supporting characters in the original Star Trek, the “… guy in the episode who dies to prove how serious the situation is.”, in the words of Guy Fleegman. Last year, SF author John Scalzi wrote the story of a starship crew that was terrified of the inevitable deaths that awaited them on away missions – if you weren’t part of the main crew, you were worse than expendable. ...

Boared Stiff. When I found out “Top (some number) (some thing)” articles were called “listicles” (for List Articles), my life was changed. I’d always had these feelings I couldn’t explain, where I’d think of some provocative list of things and then put any old things in as the list, because getting people to click on the link and come to the article – the LISTICLE – would be mission accomplished. Article could be blank. ...

Ghost Encounter of the Blurred Kind As a shaman, talking with spirits is what the dwarf Valda Onyxheart does every day. It’s in her wheelhouse. To be attacked by the hentai tentacles of a ghost when she was just trying to make some sort of spiritual connection … well, some insults just can’t be borne. It’s been a month since the Adventure Company last met, but only minutes have passed in the tunnels beneath a village surrounded and attacked by the undead. The villagers we have promised to protect have barricaded themselves within an old church; we are scouting the tunnels beneath the village for a clear path to a graveyard and an escape. ...

Code Hero Alpha Last year, or maybe the year before by now, I helped fund an innovative game on Kickstarter, Primer’s Code Hero. This game would teach you to create your own games using the cross-platform Unity game platform, UnityScript and JavaScript. UnityScript, JavaScript and Flash’s ActionScript are all closely related scripting languages, so knowing these things would be a Really Good Idea. Instead of a more traditional approach, Code Hero is the world’s first FPC (First Person Coder) game. You don’t write a game. You create a game around you. With your Code Gun. ...

Exploring a crypt with Roll20.net When there’s undead behind you, undead ahead of you, undead below you and for all I know, undead above, you just have to wonder if maybe this “living” thing is just a mistake. A mistake the gods are trying to fix. This is why Valda puts her faith and trust in good, solid stone. Stone that protects. Stone that builds. Stone which, when dropped from a good height, makes pretty short work of undead. ...

B.A. had the right idea The Adventure Company reconvened last night to prepare for our new adventures. We made a few changes since the last time we met. All new characters, for one – we’d all died in the last encounter, at the bottom of a deep hole, in front of a portal to an evil realm, a realm in which many of us are presumably now trapped for eternity. ...

Yearbook, Freshman Year at Iris Academy Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A child living in our modern world discovers she has magical powers and is invited to attend a wizard school and become part of a magical community hidden from the mundanes. Magical Diary is basically about a year in the life of a student of Hogwart’s, where there are no Dark Ones and no Harry Potter. But it does have, you know, boys. And proms. And school clubs. And also the exams are held in dungeons. ...

Valda Onyxheart The sky above the lost city of Thunderholme was gray and crumbling. Massive chunks of granite had been ripped from the sky and thrown to smash the carved homes and markets below by illithid magics and the violence of the stone giants. Rotted carrion worm carapaces blocked the obsidian paths along which ore was brought to the now-silent foundries. The mithril-glow lamps that had once lit the city like a thousand bright stars were now dark, melted by the craven horde. Now the only light in Thunderholme came from fetid corpse-fires that cast flickering green light from between the bodies of the orcs and goblins that crowded close. ...