Posts

Great, just great. I missed another Ludum Dare because it coincides with moves, sicknesses or important tests every. single. time. So here’s what I’ll do: As an aspiring antisocial game dev, I’ll just do my own game jam. Until Sunday, September the 7th, I will develop a game and I will publish it whether I think it sucks or I don’t. With about eleventy RPGs, video games, board games et cetera I have started and never finished, it just seems like the thing to do. ...

My first videogame ever was this weird edutainment thing called “Dinoropa”. It was co-funded by the german ministry of foreign affairs, and it tried to make children learn stuff about Europe, in particular about the twelve members of the European Union. Did I mention this game is old? Also, there are dinosaurs, which have nothing to do with anything. Unfortunately, this game doesn’t really seem to have a spot in gamers’ hearts nowadays. Probably because it is not really good even for 1994’s standards. But still, I think there should be at least something about it on the Internet. So I did a quick Let’s Play on it some time ago. ...

This is not the first time I review Stars without Number, the old-school SciFi sandboxing RPG by Kevin Crawford (Sine Nomine Publishing), but with my growing experience in role-play gaming I feel I missed some real important things the last two times. So, again, let’s have a look at what makes SWN special. We’ll skip the boring parts, like the character creations (it’s D&D. Take 3d6 and roll them. Got it?), combat rules (Take a d20 and I’ll tell you if you hit!), gear (pistol goes bang, laser pistol goes pew, plasma rifle goes slurp and so on) and the setting (there are stars, and they don’t have numbers). Let’s instead look right at the part of SWN that receives the most praise, the star system generation. ...

There’s been a bit of discussion about VASSAL in the ASL community, started by this blog post (warning: auto-play music). The central hypothesis of this is that ASL is a social game (to which I agree) and that VASSAL gets in the way of that (to which I disagree very strongly). I am a digital native. I have been on the internet for about ten years now, I used Twitter before it was cool and IRC greatly helped me overcome my social anxieties. Some of the people I consider my best friends are people I only know from the Internet. ...

Today, I got a phishing e-mail. I hope you have never been subject to such a shocking event for yourself, and apologize if the horror of my tale gave you a heart attack. Well, this one looked a bit more legit than most of them, and it was certainly audacious: A mail claiming to be from Yahoo and sent by a Yahoo user. It somehow passed my spam filter, so I decided I might as well tell Yahoo about it, so they might unleash their mighty rage upon the morally bankrupt offender. For sure, there would be an “abuse” e-mail account, to which I could forward the mail with an appropriate one-liner. ...

Just as a heads-up for those of you who do not keep an eye on the Humble Bundle page all the time: The new offer (valid for two weeks from now) is really worth its money. You can get the whole BioShock series, SpecOps: The Line, XCom Enemy Unknown and XCom Declassified, Mafia II and The Darkness II if you pay 20$ or more, and if you pay more than the average customer (which would mean about 6$ right now), you get everything minus XCom: EU and BioShock Infinite. ...

It doesn’t shy away from asking important questions . It is highly educational. It has well-written dialogs. And it’s as incomprehensible as Metal Gear Solid 2. You might have guessed it - it’s a Pokémon bootleg, one that’s usually known as Pokémon Vietnamese Crystal. And it is probably the most entertaining video game I ever encountered, thanks to its weird, dadaist charme. Some things are barely comprehensible, some are just plain wrong, there are about five hundred items called “POLE”, about 50% of the attacks are completely misnamed (“FLAME”? It’s Water Gun, what did you think!), but every second line in the game will make you laugh so hard it hurts. There are a couple of Let’s Plays of the thing, the most famous one was done by Delicious Cinnamon, who also have some other Pokémon bootleg games in their library. You should totally go watch it right now. ...

During a recent stay at the hospital, I had the opportunity to experiment a bit with watercolour. Never really having painted before, it turned out to be much fun and also yielded some results that I can show without being ashamed. They are already buried in the deep, dark tunnels of DeviantART, but now I have my own personal blog, I believe they deserve to be on it. :) This here was my first attempt to paint one of my railway photos, and it shows. Colour’s too thick in most places and many things lack structure (like the tracks, for example). By the way, the station shown is Usti n. L. (Czech Republic), and shows my first sighting of a class 380 multi-current engine. ...

Violence – is there anything it can’t fix? Well, history would teach us that there is indeed, but nobody likes history and it never gets invited to any LAN parties. Broforce (subtitled “Freedom Simulator”) is a very ironic indie side scroller about solving problems the only way worth the effort: by making lots of stuff explode. The gameplay is highly focused on co-op, so the only component I really tried out was the campaign because everything else appears to need other players. Because the game is one of these Early Access things that are all the rage these days on Steam, nobody in my peer group seems to own it.

This is. My regular opponent and me sat down to play S13 Priority Target, and then we played it again with reversed sides. I lost twice, which confirms the ASL Scenario Archive’s claim of perfect balance. My opponent wrote AARs for both games, which are pretty good and are really detailed in their analysis of how I managed to screw up so much.