Play: Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance II PS2

February 6th, 2010 by Teh Bagder - 0 views - No Comments
Posted in PS2, Play

It’s been a while since I’ve felt like sitting down and playing one of the consoles that we have in our house. Lately, much of my gaming has been on my iPod Touch or on my MacBook (and even then only when booted into Windows XP at Boot Camp). I’ve got lots of games for lots of platforms, but I usually don’t have a great deal of time to sit down and play games at any one time. When I get home from work at night, I’m usually to tired to play video games; most of the video games I like require you to engage your brain because of either gameplay of storyline. Casual games are fine, but I tend to prefer long-form games which require you to think and have a story attached to them. The problem is that I’ve not really had more than a half hour at a time where it’s been quiet enough for me to play, and I’ve been awake enough to play. Last night was the exception.

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The Apple iPad: What It Means To Me

January 28th, 2010 by Teh Bagder - 2 views - No Comments
Posted in Opine, Tech

Apple released its newest piece of tech yesterday, the iPad, and immediately half of the world claimed it as the second coming, and the other half decried it. Comments were made about it’s name, about it being an OS X killer, about it being too expensive, about it not having built in 3G on the base model, about it being tied to AT&T, about it being a Kindle killer, about it not being a Kindle killer, and about it being just a bigger iPod Touch. Personally, I think it’s a fantastic product, particularly for someone like me, but it’s not going to replace laptops like the MacBook or MacBook Pro nor displace the iPod Touch any time soon. Here are my thoughts on it.

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Roleplaying: Rifts TGE Act 1 Session 1 Summary

January 24th, 2010 by Teh Bagder - 4 views - No Comments
Posted in Roleplaying

I ran the first part of the Rifts TGE game tonight. We only had a couple of hours to play due to starting late. There are four in the group:

  • A Crazy who left his farm for a better life as a borg, but who got suckered into become a Crazy.
  • A mutant 4 foot tall pigeon trained in military espionage and combat.
  • A Cyber Knight with a penchant for being a complete rule stickler.
  • A wizard who got sucked through from another world to the world of Rifts and who is looking to get back home.

I started the game by having the players having flashes of darkness, pain and bursting light before being able to hear other voices in their head. After this happened a couple of times, they woke up in a lab, all of them strapped to tables and being introduced to a Coalition scientist who told them they have been "acquired" for a mission, or at least phase 1 of it. Special nanotechnology had been used to insert a microtransmitter/bomb in their brains which allowed them to communicate non-verbally. The bomb was tamper-proof and set to go off if the nanotech was interfered with at all. The group was required to perform a mission for the Coalition: to go through a rift and retrieve a specific artifact. They were given special wrist computers that included a tracking device as well as a mini encyclopedia about the world they were being sent to. (Yes, it’s railroading, but it’s going to serve an important part of the arc later.) They have 7 days to complete the mission or the nanotech will allow the bombs in their heads to go off. Any interference with the bombs would trigger them. If they failed to return with the Crux Malefactant, then they were dead men.

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Getting Too Old For 8 Bit Games

January 24th, 2010 by Teh Bagder - 1 views - No Comments
Posted in PC Games, Retro

It’s been a long time since I played Dark Forces, and a long time since I played a game with such low resolution graphics. Even with playing it in DOSBox and upping the screen rendering, I’ve been so spoiled with quality graphics that I’ve forgotten how to play many of the older DOS games I own. Case in point: I couldn’t work out how to get the stupid Death Star plans in the first mission so that I could get picked up by my ship. It took my 8-year-old son to point at what looked like a really digitized lever on a back wall and tell me to click that. Lo and behold, a wall went up and I got the plans and made my escape.

I feel old.

Crud.

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Roleplay: Rifts TGE & Recycling Universes

January 20th, 2010 by Teh Bagder - 1 views - No Comments
Posted in Roleplaying

Many moons ago, I had grandiose plans to write and publish a number of RPG game products. A lot of things happened to stop that happening, but a lot of the material for the game worlds was material that was going to be used for stories and novels. Some of them have had work done on them, some haven’t. I’ve decided to integrate some of the settings into the game of Rifts that I’m about to run. This way I get to use the setting material and have some fun with it.

I want to say more about the campaign, but don’t want to say too much until the game is underway just in case any of the players stumble upon this. Suffice to say that there will be massive sprinklings of spaceships, demons, aliens, vampires, manitous, super heroes, cybertechnology, alternate dimensions, special items, nanotechnology, and a very short time frame before the players go Big Badda Boom. Unless they succeed. But they might just go boom anyway.

I’ll most likely post details of the campaign after each session. Watch this space.

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Roleplay: Rifts TGE Campaign

January 17th, 2010 by Teh Bagder - 0 views - No Comments
Posted in Roleplaying

The gaming group that I just joined up with have accepted me as a regular player, and we’re going to have three games running at the same time, with one game being played each week over a 3 week rotation every Sunday night. I’ve been suckered into running a Rifts game, which we’ll start next week.

None of the guys have ever played Rifts, but one of them has been champing at the bit for a while to play it. We’ll roll characters next week, and I’m going to allow characters from any Palladium setting to be involved in the game. Sounds like a bad idea, and it could be, but I’ve got a very specific story arc in mind for us to play to, and multi-dimensionality is going to be playing an active part in it.Which makes sense, because it’s Rifts, right? Well, I’m going to be turning the game concept on its head a little and messing with a bunch of stuff, so this isn’t going to be your normal game of Rifts. I’m incorporating aspects of a story concept I had many years ago, as well as some other stuff I’ve worked on in the past. The players are going to be dealing with rifts that access many different spacetimes and realities, and they’re going to have to deal with one major problem: if they don’t do what they’re told, then they’ll die. It’s not exactly railroading, as it’s important to the story arc I’m putting together, and it’s much bigger than just the players. Of course, they won’t know that, but they’ll probably work it out. The general idea is that there will be five acts, with one per game session, meaning it will take about 3 months to get the entire campaign out of the way. That’s a good timeframe because it will finish before the start of the next quarter, and before I have to get back into schoolwork. It also means that when that game has run its campaign course, I can run a different game for the next block.

The codename for the game is TGE. What does that stand for? You’ll just have to wait and read the updates I’m going to post to find out. Assuming the players figure it out during the campaign…

Best get back to reading back up on the game so I don’t look like an idiot when I run it. Ah, but it does feel damn good to be gaming again!

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Roleplay: Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 Entrophia

January 17th, 2010 by Teh Bagder - 1 views - No Comments
Posted in Roleplaying

Shortly, I’ll be heading out the door to meet up with some guys from Ohio State who have allowed me to join their gaming group. I’ve only played with them once before, but it was a lot of fun. Today I get to join in a long-running campaign that one of the guys has been running. I’m about 10 sessions late, so a lot has happened, so I get to get thrown in media res. The setting can be summed up as D&D Supers in some ways. I decided that I wanted to have a character that would allow me to grow into, and used the concept of having a tabula rasa John Doe character to play. The character has a severe lack of memory after waking up on board a sailing ship as a press-ganged crew member. He has since escaped from the ship and is stuck on a new continent and has been moving around for the past year or so trying to work out who he is, why he can’t remember his past, and how to get home. I’ve got some of the details of his character worked out, but I’ll be adding to it as I go. In short, he’s a rogue who knows how to fight well, and is pretty eagle-eyed and observant. He’s also pretty knowledgeable about the world and seems to be able to meld into any group of people without any trouble. He’s also pretty handy with swords and daggers and has shown footpads and others who have thought to prey on him the error of their ways.

I used the excellent freeware PCGen software to create the character, and it’s a pretty neat tool. The latest version 5.16.2 adds support for 4e sources too.

I am so stoked to be gaming again! Today is going to be a lot of fun. More to report once the game is over.

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Play: Torchlight (Steam)

January 6th, 2010 by Teh Bagder - 24 views - No Comments
Posted in PC Games, Play

Torchlight Loading Screen

Last week, during the Holiday Sale, Steam had a deal on Torchlight, offering it for $4.99, which was an absolute steal. I purchased it a few weeks ago when it dropped to $9.99 on special, but I’m not bitter. Not me, no. So, what is Torchlight? Think of it as the meshing of single-player Diablo, Fate and Mythos, which is pretty much what it is because the development team for Torchlight were all involved in these games.

How’s the gameplay, you ask? I’ll tell you…

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Play: Star Wars X-Wing

January 6th, 2010 by Teh Bagder - 2 views - No Comments
Posted in PC Games, Play, Retro

Ah, DOSBox, you make reliving my youth all the easier and ten times more enjoyable. There’s nothing like blowing the snot out of TIE Fighters while listening to a midi version of the Star Wars music as you zoom around the galaxy in your X-Wing fighter. It’s been years since I played this game, but I could still remember the keyboard hotkeys. Note to self: use a mouse as it’s too hard to play this game via the multitouch trackpad of my MacBook Pro.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to blow up some bad guys…

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Retro: Dark Forces Mac Attack

December 26th, 2009 by Teh Bagder - 9 views - No Comments
Posted in PC Games, Play, Retro

Lately, I’ve been on quite the Star Wars kick, so I’ve been keen to get back into playing the Jedi Knight games, which started with the original Dark Forces game. I can still remember when this game first came out. Of all the first-person shooters that came out around that time, including Doom, Hexen and Wolfenstein, this is the game that sucked me into shooters.

As I’m Mac-centric now, I loaded up Boxer and imported Dark Forces into it, and proceeded to shoot as many Stormtroopers in the face as I could (see above). I’m making many new Christmas memories, beating the snot out of the Imperials.

Sing along now: We wish you a Merry Christmas, and blaster shots in the faaaaaaaace!

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