Fear the Boot, the tabletop RPG podcast, has been nominated at the Gen Con EN World RPG Awards. If you remember, these are the guys who interviewed me back in May. I’ve since become friends with the hosts and I really enjoy the show, so I’m really cheering for them. If you’re so inclined, please stop on over and give them a vote. If you’ve never heard the show before, now would be a good time to check it out.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “DM of the Rings CXXV:
Faux Pas”
Someone else has discovered the joy of lampooning Lord of the Rings. In this thread, the author explores a possible ending scene to the story. It’s a pretty good use of screencaps.
Think Geek always has great shirts, but Wil Wheaton points to one which is particularly funny.
Which reminds me:
In talking about shows and movies which are ripe for the DM of the Rings treatment, I think the richest target out there is Star Trek: TNG. It has all the ingredients that make DMotR work:
I don’t know how good it would be as a source for roleplaying jokes. I’m betting there’s a Trek RPG out there somewhere, but if there is it isn’t nearly as popular as D20 Star Wars. I think using it to parody sci-fi in general would work much better.
Picture Picard as a touchy-feely pacifist politically correct diplomat, Riker as an intergalactic manwhore, and Wesley as a sarcastic potty-mouth teen. The jokes pretty much write themselves. You could do ten pages with just those three characters. It’s a goldmine.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “DM of the Rings CXXIV:
Medic!”
I’m a big fan of Stardock. I loved Galactic Civilizations. I loved the sequel even more. Even aside from the quality of the games, I like how they do their thing: Their games have no anti-piracy hassle. They continue to update and enhance the core game for free for many months after release. I’m not taking about the usual bug-fixery, I’m talking about making the game deeper and more robust based on feedback from the user base.
Now I find out they have a new game in the works: Sins of a Solar Empire. I visited the page, read the synopsis, and thought Hey – Homeworld clone. That’s nice. I guess. But a closer look reveals this to be more than a remix of an earlier hit. It looks like they’re trying to take the Masters of Orion / Galactic Civilizations gameplay and… make it realtime? Really? You can do that? How does that work, exactly?
I guess we’ll find out. The game is in beta now. I’ll be watching this one.
Deus Ex Mankind Divided was a clumsy, tone-deaf allegory that thought it was clever, and it managed to annoy people of all political stripes.
What lessons can we learn from the abrupt demise of this once-impressive games studio?
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Two minutes of fun at the expense of a badly-run theme park.
What makes this borderline indie title so much better than the AAA juggernauts that came before?
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2014.
How does image compression work, and why does it create those ugly spots all over some videos and not others?
This is it. This is the dumbest cutscene ever created for a AAA game. It's so bad it's simultaneously hilarious and painful. This is "The Room" of video game cutscenes.
No, game prices don't "need" to go up. That's not how supply and demand works. Instead, the publishers need to be smarter about where they spend their money.
T w e n t y S i d e d
