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Daily Thought OK, there is a movie coming out this Friday currently in theaters called Legion. I am so looking forward to seeing this movie... once it comes out on DVD. For now, don't spoil it for me, but you really should consider catching it in theaters. It looks like a total throwback to the cheesy horror golden age.
2010/02/04 Oh frell it's Wednesday? It still counts as Wednesday night if the sun's not up right? Been really really distracted by all these people I know having horrible tragedies and by learning an awesome new skill and by trying to buckle down and finish some really overdue GameSpite writing. Anyway, this is a really great Consciousness Stream in that this is a movie that, seriously, you DO NOT want to personally sit through, but it is of enough historical significance that you'll benefit from the experience-by-proxy. THX-1138 is George Lucas' first and least watchable movie. It also lead me to the realization that he didn't start out as some genius film maker who totally knew his craft and then somehow sadly turned into this clueless freak. He was always that freak. His creative contribution to the original Star Wars movies is just grossly overestimated is all.
2010/01/30 This month's Devil's Advocate comes in right at the buzzer. Incidentally, I honestly had absolutely no idea there was a new Vandal Hearts game in development, let alone released this month, until I had written this and was hunting for screens for it. So, this being an incredibly topical update is purely coincidental. Ideally I should edit it to make mention of the new game, but, well, it's 6 hours of forgettable downloadable fluff by a different dev team, and my love for Vandal Hearts has NO connection with its name. Incidentally, the only reason it took so long to get to this one is that I could have sworn it was one of the first 5 games I ever covered with this feature.
2010/01/27 Ever hear of Ink? Me neither. Rented it on the grounds of someone seeing the case in a warehouse and noting the box art was interesting.
2010/01/21 Robocop 3 is bad in all the wrong ways. It's bad like The Neverending Story 3 is bad. They couldn't get the guy who plays Robocop to play Robocop. The director's career was completely destroyed by this movie. Which is a shame because he made Monster Squad, and there was clearly some potential for the guy. Also, you may have noticed that this is late and this month's DA is REALLY late. My submissions for the next GSQ are also late. It's been one of those sorta weeks. All this stuff should be back on track by weekend's end though.
2010/01/13 Is it mere coincidence that Spoony tossed up a big pile of Robocop cheese a week after my Consciousness Stream on it? Well, yeah, probably. While we're all in the spirit though, here's Robocop 2. The plot revolves largely against the creation of another cyborg killing machine, who is given the name Robocop 2. Seriously. How great is that?
2010/01/06 I'd love to be able to go "Part X, part Y, ALL COP!" but well, Robocop actually used that as a tagline, so that's no fun.
2009/12/30 If you're getting burnt out, you should be happy to know this is the last Rambo movie I'm covering. Also the only one whose title is actually Rambo and not First Blood. I felt guilty just plowing through the series like this, but the first isn't the movie you think it is, the second... is, and this one? This is one that makes for an interesting contrast. Anyway, end of the year. Did a whole lot of these, contributed to a book, tossed a freebie of which I'm proud/ashamed of, and learned I can make my own flash games without stealing or paying for overpriced Adobe stuff. So... productive month. Rest of the year, not so much.
2009/12/23 Christmas update means I should toss up a movie with a lot of red and green right? This counts, right? Also, I'm in a weird mood, so I might be tossing a special horrifying freebie up early Christmas morning over at WDL.
2009/12/17 I was tempted to dedicate this month's Devil's Advocate to Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, as it is a nifty game getting a lot of reviews from people who are decidedly missing the point. The jury is still out on how it's going over though, plus that would make three consecutive horror games, and I have some misgivings about covering a game made by someone I know well enough to IM my niggling gripes to personally. So here's Super Mario Sunshine instead. Enjoy.
2009/12/16 Rambo First Blood is not what I expected, but still really shows what an 80s action movie is all about. Giving EVERYONE machine guns and shotguns. I'm really not getting where my time is going lately. It's not like I'm falling behind on stuff because I'm doing other stuff, it just feels like I'm going to bed 3 hours after getting up every day. Weird. DA tomorrow.
2009/12/10 Lurking Fear slipped through the cracks. Late due to power outage. Yes I am keeping blurbs short so you see the book plug below. Speaking of, my first entry's on the site.
2009/12/02 C.H.U.D. is too boring to really appreciate ironically, but you need to see the movie clip at the end here.
2009/11/30

> get book

OK, first off, remember that big surprise Thor was supposed to have up on Halloween? That's finally up now. Grab it quick though, it's a one day only freebie.

A LONG time ago, The Incredible Frog Boy (one of the other Original Weirdos With Notable Personal Websites along with myself, Thor, and Sharkey from the dawn of the internet) went crazy and decided to self-publish a quarterly gaming magazine as an actual printed publication, dedicated to all the stuff people who write about games for a living WANT to write about but don't really get to due to the harsh realities of the business. In other words, it's all stuff like my Devil's Advocate features, instead of hyped up previews of upcoming flash in the pan games. I fully approve of this, and applied to write for it. I actually got a thumbs up on the little samples I sent, but things were hectic and I didn't actually get invited into the secret clubhouse. Skip ahead a few months and tada. I'm officially writing stuff for GameSpite Quarterly. Theoretically I'll be doing a regular feature for it in the future, but at present, I've just written a handful of random articles for the very large and somewhat gimmicky third volume.

GSQ3, The Encyclopedia of 8-Bit Heroes, is a huge collection of biographies of various characters from various 8-bit games. I would say every single one of them even, but that's tricky to pin down and a few really obscure ones I know were cut for reasons of sanity. They tend to be very tongue-in-cheek, in-jokey, and darn amusing. If you're the penniless sort, the majority of it will be reprinted on the official website, one article at a time, over the next few months. If you actually have money though, it'd be really cool if you would actually pick a copy up. You have a number of options there too based on your personal miserliness.
The Hardcover Version is $40 for all 314 pages of goodness, and has, I say, the best cover.
The Standard Version is $16 for 280 pages (so, 11 articles are omitted), which is probably the best bet if you aren't rolling in cash. Which I assume you aren't, because only a handful of people reading this page regularly have bought anything I've attempted to shill in the past.
The Budget Version is only $12, but also only 160 pages long. It exists only because of a promise to always have a $12 version of each issue available, made with the assumption that nothing this massive would ever be printed.

If anyone is stalking me, you'll be happy to know that my all my contributions actually wound up in every version, which is surprising since I came in late and was pretty much just picking over the obscure crumbs of the Sega Master System. Incidentally, the Budget version has enough of the "A" section excised that you can see a barely legible version of the Alis (Phantasy Star) entry in the preview I just linked to. I'm rather proud of that one. In any case, I theoretically get a cut of the money these bring in. Granted, we're talking about maybe 3% of the profits generated by a book barely breaking even on printing costs, but still. I benefit from any of you actually buying a copy. As do all of the other amusing weirdos who contributed.

Oh, and while I'm plugging, the Stupidly Huge Discount on The Massive Vs. The Masses is still running.

2009/11/25 The Gate SERIOUSLY messed me up when I was 8 or so, but seriously, it's darn nifty now.
2009/11/19 "Characters can gain no benefit from carrying a sack of rats in hopes of healing their allies by hitting the rats."
2009/11/17 I need a babysitter or something to keep this kitten busy. I haven't been able to get any work done since I got him. If he isn't attacking my feet or pouncing the off switch on my power strip, he's finding a new way to kill himself. The only respite I've had was when he was dangerously sick and needed serious medical attention. This has nothing to do with Resident Evil: Outbreak, the subject of this month's Devil's Advocate, it's just why it's two days late. Also, dear gods! I could have SWORN I'd covered this when back when Left 4 Dead was first released. If I'd realized I could have just done this last month, I wouldn't have had to go on a horror binge back in June. Of course, then I'd never have fallen in love with Siren, so it all worked out.
2009/11/12 Yeah, I'm late again this week. Medical emergency sorta deal. Also, it took me a while to dig out and format this week's text. Remember how I kept saying if I ever run out of movies I'd post my first-reaction thoughts on Dandifor? Don't panic though, it's temporary. I just put C.H.U.D. on netflix.
2009/11/05 Almost forgot to link to my commentary on this documentary following a Japanese civil servant which also serves as a metaphor about post-war Japanese military impotence. After you read it, search for Ebert's review. Unlike me, he remembered to get a screen grab of the guy standing in the giant purple speedo.
2009/10/31 You can't all ride in the same chron-o-john! Also, let's pretend I totally intended to post this CS 3 days late to make sure I had a Halloween update, and not that I've been so stressed out and busy I forgot what day it was. Also, some time after, oh, 6 PM today? You really really need to come back and click this link and this link for awesome time-critical stuff that's otherwise costly.
2009/10/21 Warning! This subject of this week's consciousness stream contains scenes, many of which I screengrabbed, which are not suitable for anyone to watch. We're talking Ninja Scroll levels of messed up. You should all read it though, because if you don't see a detailed account with screenshots, you won't believe me that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a PG-13 movie with sex scenes, tentacle rape, frontal male nudity, and even more horrible racist charicatures than in Fritz the Cat.
2009/10/17 A bit of a family emergency means this month's Devil's Advocate is late, but it's a good one. After using up the best material before last year's october entry and having to go with Ecco (which I maintain is a valid choice), I scraped together what money I could over the year to hunt down a variety of relatively obscure horror games off eBay. The best of the bunch by far was Siren. I thought it was fantastic, but it's polarizingly difficult. In retrospect, I could have taken the easy way out and just given Dino Crisis its due, but I'm glad I found this one.
2009/10/14 Nightbreed is a rather odd one. I'd ramble more, but it's a busy busy day.
2009/10/07 Despite the fact that I'm essentially talking about two different movies at once here this is, somehow, one of the shortest consciousness streams I've ever written.
2009/10/01 I attack with lissome rampancy! This has really been one of those weeks where I wish I had some form of personal assistant/minion/zombie slave on hand. This kitten is only letting me get about 4 hours sleep a night then doing some pretty serious bloodletting when I try to get any work done. I need more actual doors in this place.
2009/09/23 You've seen this one. Actually I can't guarentee that. The other day I had a conversation where I had to explain the premise of the movie Gremlins to someone who honestly had never even heard of it. That's just kinda crazy. It's harder not to have heard of The Terminator here though (yeah, who knew? There's a "the" in there). What with them still making awful sequels to it to this day. Plus a TV series where the part of Arnold Schwarzenegger was played by River Tam. That's some amusing casting there.
2009/09/17 This week's Devil's Advocate deals with a very serious addiction plaguing millions of gamers. On the street, they call it SMAC. And I am so not kidding about how Miriam fans creep me the heck out. Seriously, frell that bible-thumping psycho. Also, I didn't get a chance to paraphrase my favorite first encounter in the expansion: "I'm Deirdre! I love Planet!" "Is that so? As it happens, I AM Planet." "O... K... so uh, friends then?"
2009/09/16 Crank 2 wasn't scheduled for today, but it's the first of these where I had the sense to format it first thing so I didn't have to guess how many screens to take. As such, it's been ready to go for a while, unlike what I planned to post. I'm really off my game this week. DA tomorrow.
2009/09/09 OK. This is the last Consciousness Stream I managed to rescue off the old drive. Backlash: Oblivion 2. It's awesome. Seriously, it's like someone took Wild Wild West (the show, not the movie), crossbred it with Shadowrun, and then when nobody picked up the pilot just put his fingers in his ears, screamed "I'm not listening!" and made a couple episodes anyway. I need to see the original still.
2009/09/02 It's been a few hours! Now you can finally enjoy the pure bliss of vicariously watching Tokyo Gore Police! Honestly, this movie is a gem. I crammed in more screens than ever before and STILL couldn't fit in over half of what I really wanted to share. I would say don't even read this, just go rent it, but I can't in good conscience recommend this movie to, well, anyone. Even the official trailer for it is 100% stuff I couldn't screencap and meet my own decency standards. I can however whole-heartedly recommend it to anyone who still wants to see it after reading this.
2009/09/01 First, here's a quick preview of what's going up in a few hours, finally. OK, now that that's out of the way, I just realized I never pointed out the Level Up episode on GameArts here. Nor the two-parter before it from when my hard drive was out. Currently, things are Unwell in Level Up land, but a new episode should be going up for this week, possibly a bit late.
2009/08/26 Come into the spiral! Still busy with mindnumbing drive recovery attempts, but here's this for you at least. Incidentally, since seeing this movie, I've managed to hunt down the original manga and uh... no, it's actually not all that direct an adaptation. The manga is very episodic, the movie only covers a small portion of it, and the actual ending is a fair bit after the whole town is destroyed by escalating weirdness.
2009/08/18 See? I'm getting back into the swing of things! Here's a Devil's Advocate on Shadow of the Colossus. Seriously, the fact that I'm able to at all rationalize writing this one is a crime. Also, now that I have twenty of these under my belt, I really feel I should look into getting them printed somewhere where, you know, there's a sizable audience of people to read them.
2009/08/17 OK. See, when I said this Consciousness Stream for Machine Girl would go up "tomorrow" I was basing that on the assumption that I had the basic tools on hand to make it happen. My text editor of choice stopped being free, needed to replace that. Needed a new FTP program. Graphic Converter, the program I use to properly size the screens? That didn't make the move. The directory that was supposed to have the screens? That was empty, but they WERE found elsewhere. Etc. Etc. Been a rough few weeks. Anyway, go read about Machine Girl. The next one of these goes up next wednesday, with another nice silly weird one. Oh, and tomorrow I'll have to get this month's DA up, also rather late. Thanks for bearing with me on all this. Also thanks to the people who bid that ad banner up while I wasn't doing anything. Cool of you that.
2009/08/13 So, a funny thing happened to me oh... two weeks ago. I'm just sitting here, minding my own business, when my hard drive decides to fail. Now, I'm not the sort of person who never backs anything up or anything like that, but I'm also not the sort of person who has a magical elf backing up every file every hour. Some really really important things are intact, but everything else is... well, honestly, theoretically intact since it's not a mechanical failure. The one thing which is looking like it might be well and truly gone though is the screens for the next few Consciousness Stream posts. Normally, this wouldn't be a big deal, but this would mean uploading Uzumaki and Tokyo Gore Police image free, and I just can't do that. These are both really awesomely insane movies with very distinctive visual styles, so you just need the screens. If I can't find some way to recover them, I might just have to rent these two again just for this. Or, you know, find screens elsewhere. So uh... for now, I'm just going to have to go and skip right ahead to Machine Girl, and you'll have to deal with all the TGP back-references. It should go up tomorrow.

Oh yeah, and if you're one of those people who likes to throw money at people when they have major hardware failures and slip into massive debt trying to replace them? Yeah, I'm not going to be all fake-prideful there. Getting this thing working again kinda maxed a credit card back out.
2009/07/30 I just realized I forgot to link to last week's Level Up. It was a surprisingly interesting episode for being about games you don't actually play. Which, in turn, tend to be oddly difficult. Anyway, this all kinda works out because now you can read about games you don't play on a day that we don't record a podcast. Scheduling the three-person deals can be tricky. Mainly because even the ones that are just me and Thor have been getting recorded at the 11th hour due to both of us being busy.
2009/07/29 ZOMBIE JAWAS! That should be all the incentive you need to check out this week's Consciousness Stream. Actually, this being the THIRD movie in the so-not-what-you'd-expect Phantasm series, it has something even more out of place for this sort of thing. I won't ruin the surprise though. Well, I mean, I will, but in a fun way, with a picture.
2009/07/23 This week's CS is Crank. Yes Crank. A movie you've actually heard of. What you would think is a mainstream, mundane summer action flick. It can't be as crazy as some of this other stuff, right? Right? Wrong.
2009/07/18 Most people when they go to cover a powerhouse publisher, they'll go straight to their flagship series, then cover the next most popular stuff, and possibly take a third part to address everything else. Not Level Up though! No, we cover the games of Enix that fall through the cracks FIRST, then later we'll come back for that whole Dragon Whatever series. Also, I spoil the ending of The 7th Saga. Because it's just infuriatingly bad.
2009/07/17 This week's Consciousness Stream sure as heck is not Day of the Dead. It's also not up on time. I literally lost my ability to upload anything for a while JUST after getting the DA for the month up. Sorry about that. Also, it really needs to be stressed that I absolutely did not cherry pick these screens for stupid expressions. I scanned through, and grabbed 1 screen every 5 minutes or so into the movie, in a rush. Every shot with someone's face that wasn't too blurry to use, is in here. Everyone just really has those dopey looks on their faces. Not because they're playing stupid characters, that's just the actors looking natural. And those last two? Yeah, those are all "zombies" there. That's the extent of the makeup quality in this movie.
2009/07/15 Wednesday the 15th? Again? You know what that means. Devil's Advocate and Consciousness Stream on the same day. The latter will be up in a bit, but for now, let me actually say nice things about a PS2 Final Fantasy game.
2009/07/10 You know that OTHER podcast I have going? Honestly, I forgot too, but there's a new one up now.
2009/07/09 This week's Level Up is about weird crazy tricks to make games easier, the weird morality of doing so, and some really crazy tangents. Ran a bit long by our standards (90 minutes) but it's some pretty good stuff I'd say.
2009/07/08 You know you're wondering what it's like watching Repo: The Genetic Opera. The short answer is you watch Kefka sing surprisingly catchy songs about organ harvesting. The long answer is that with 80 minutes or so of an incoherent silly plot going on. Oh, and lots of gore.
2009/07/02 Last week's Level Up was all about memorable sidekicks. This week's is on Bethesda. Which is a pretty weird name for a developer really.
2009/07/01 OK. Back from a trip across the country I may or may not have remembered to mention beforehand, and I'm almost back in the swing of things. Level Up went up without me plugging it here, with next week's being recorded as soon as Thor finishes whatever's keeping him right now. And of course, since it's still Wednesday by my purposes, we have a very special consciousness stream this week. This may very well be the most amusing to read one of these I've posted yet. Because man was this a WTF-inducing movie. Plus I spared you all a screenshot of the one scene you really don't want to see, isn't that nice of me?
2009/06/24 Very odd consciousness stream this week. I think I might have to cut back on the bizarre and/or hard to watch movies for a while though, my backlog as it stands is enough to carry me all the way through the rest of the summer.
2009/06/19 Level Up Episode 5 - Strategy and Tactical RPGs is exactly what it says on the tin. It's also the last one of these where we just generally discuss a sub/spinoff-genre of RPGs, since aside from having them all just about covered now, we're getting a little burnt out on that sort of format. So, next week's will be less highbrow rambling, and more amusing anecdotes, most likely.
2009/06/17 This week's consciousness stream was actually more or less aborted about halfway through. I was planning to skip straight over it and on to the next one in the queue at first, but then I looked back over it, and I think what's here is actually rather amusing. So, up it goes.
2009/06/15 I'm crawling out of the hole of my massive work backlog here. Here's this month's Devil's Advocate, covering a game I love so much the only reason it took me so long to write it up is that I was sure I already had: Dragon Force. It strikes me that even the best Saturn games are too obscure for most people to have any real knowledge on them. I might have to cover Panzer Dragoon Saga sometime too.
2009/06/11 I almost forgot to plug the second part of our MMORPG podcast. I am still dead serious about wanting to bring about a Shadowrun MMO. Anyone out there have the coding skills to set up a 3D environment with large numbers of people logging into it? I can pretty much handle things from there.
2009/06/10 This week's Consciousness Stream is a wonderfully cheesy bit of vintage low budget 80s horror, Creepozoids. Cheesy goodness.
2009/06/04 This week's Level Up features me, Thor, and Silkenray all talking about why we don't much care for MMORPGs, but how we probably would if they did a few things differently. It ran so long that we ended up turning it into a two-parter, so the rest will come next week. Speaking of Silkenray and podcasts, she also joined me on this month's WDL podcast, which I'm procrastinating a bit on posting because my hard drive is too full to edit it just now.
2009/06/03 This week's Consciousness Stream is the sequel to Suspiria. It has a bit of that whole middle of a trilogy syndrome going on, where it's watchability largely depends on the assumption of a satisfying third movie. Of course, in this case, that conclusion was left hanging for nearly 3 decades, and what eventually came out was terrible, as you may see in a few weeks if I end up posting that one.
2009/06/02 Here's, well, last month's Devil's Advocate going up horribly late. Part of the problem is that it was just a crazy busy month. Another part was that, rushing to finish Lost Odyssey for the sake of completeness, my enthusiasm dropped off pretty severely. Didn't want to drop it for another game because the story of how the game came to be is important though, so, here it is.
2009/05/28 And here's this week's Level Up. This week we talk about console RPGs vs. PC RPGs, and how dungeon crawls really don't show a lot of allegiance to either design philosophy. Plus I get Thor playing Phantasy Star.
2009/05/28 Yeah, I'm all kinds of behind schedule this month. Here's a consciousness stream for a movie that was REALLY painful to watch, which should make it a great read for you folks.
2009/05/22 I'm on track for 4 consecutive days of updating here, with the late DA post due up tomorrow, and today bringing you this totally random tirade against inherently flawed browser game genres.
2009/05/21 Here's the first Level Up podcast. As mentioned two weeks back, this is me and Thor rambling on about RPGs for an hour or so every week. This first one was recorded with antiquated software that lagged rather profoundly. Like, 10 seconds between saying something and having it heard at points. Next week we're doing something that should work much better there, and not set things back with weeks of editing and retakes. That said, it's a pretty darn amusing listen.
2009/05/20 This week's consciousness stream requires a bit of a disclaimer. There aren't any screenshots, and there's a fair amount of swearing since I committed myself to direct-quoting a particular gimmick it uses. That being said, Feast 3 almost makes up for how lame Feast 2 was.

Also, you'll notice that I'm way behind on this month's DA. Sorry about that, it's a long story involving a week long power outage, but it should be up some time this weekend. Meanwhile, this here podcast deal is finally edited and should be posted here tomorrow, and I finally got this area I've been working on forever added into RetroMUD.
2009/05/13 Who's a pretty horror movie? Are you a pretty horror movie? Yes you are! And... no I don't know why I'm talking to Suspiria like it's a puppy. It is a downright beautiful movie though.
2009/05/07 Recently, I've gotten into this whole podcast notion. Firstly, On or around the first of every month, I'll be posting an official World Domination podcast, talking about all the tabletop gaming stuff. Also, as an extra special treat for you all, Thor and I have decided to combine our long-simmering urges to ramble on about RPGs as we haven't really had a chance to do since the ol' Q&A days, and start a podcast covering RPGs of the console and PC sort. We already recorded the first one, and I think you'll enjoy it. Should be going up a week from today, give or take.
2009/05/06 I was really unamused watching this week's movie. This might transfer over to you people reading it. Because, see, it's boring and repetitive. The good news is, the movie I actually watched most recently, which you'll be hearing about in uh... 2 weeks? 3? I've lost track of my backlog size. In any case, it was profoundly awful in the way that it should be very entertaining for you to read of my suffering.
2009/04/29 It was really adding the images to this week's Consciousness Stream. Normally it's tricky finding enough motion-blur free, G-rated, relevant images to grab. Here though, I crammed in 8 screen grabs and still have 5 or so I really wish I could fit.
2009/04/22 It's Wednesday! You know what that means! I ramble about another weird movie you've never heard of! Actually, you might have heard of this one. It's still weird though!
2009/04/15 It's double update day! Enjoy my running thoughts on Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death. A real movie that actually exists. AND isn't porn! It's pretty amazing really. There's also a new DA up today. Watch my two things I do coincide! Watch it still not get the bid on that ad banner up over 20 cents. Ah well.
2009/04/15 I'm not entirely happy with how this month's Devil's Advocate came out. It isn't that P.N.03 doesn't deserve more attention, it's just that it's such a straight-forward, clear cut game that there isn't a whole lot to say. Next month's planned focus though should be a real treat though. There's a real crazy web of betrayal and loss and redemption with a refugee from an alternate timeline doing battle with an insidious imposter and a tearjerker of an ending. And that's just the history lesson about the dev team.
2009/04/08 Ok, ever since I've started this whole consciousness stream deal, I'm compelled to go and rent stuff like this. I hope you people appreciate this sort of thing. Next week's selection is Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death. Between that and the CS going up the same day, here's hoping the ad experiment actually pays off for a change.

Oh, and I've been working out the whole blog notion the kids are all into these days. The WDL page is all "web 2.0ish" now, but this one's stuck like this while I work some kinks out. In the meantime, this exists.
2009/04/01 I've worked back up to a nice backlog of these consciousness stream deals. Here's this week's, Fear of the Dark. Incidentally, today was supposed to be the start of me actually bloggifying this page and letting people do the whole comment thing, but I forgot that I can't actually get a database set up on this site last I checked. I might have to just plain set a blog up somewhere and link to stuff on here.
2009/03/25 This week's consciousness stream features an actually-good movie! One you most likely have never heard of at that! So, before reading my thoughts on Phenomena you might want to consider hunting a copy down, what with the spoilers. This is not the John Travolta with psychic powers movie. This is Dr. Loomis, Sarah from Labyrinth, her army of insects, and a monkey tracking down a serial killer to a soundtrack of RPG final boss fight music. Seriously, it's awesome.
2009/03/18 Look everyone! I decided to get all professional with the consciousness stream thing and load this week's up with pictures! Oh, and I also stumbled into 2 good ones over the last week, so I'm not pulling out the D&D just yet.
2009/03/15 I feel like I haven't thrown up a Devil's Advocate in forever, which is weird because it's been the standard interval, and it's not like I wrote all this Consciousness Stream stuff this month. The Devilman Woman stuff in particular is actually a couple years old. In any case, this month we're attempting to separate the two Zelda: Oracle games out into two distinct games, because they need it. It would be far more sensible for me to post a DA on Resident Evil: Outbreak, what with RE5 coming out, but I could have sworn I already did that when Left 4 Dead was released. Someone PLEASE remind me when October rolls around to do it then.
2009/03/11 This is the last movie in the Consciousness Stream stack. I've been trying to build up a bigger backlog, believe me. I've been watching some sick depraved stuff, it's just all been too boring to produce anything worth reading. Especially this here Hungarian Alice and Wonderland where all the animals are animated corpses. I don't mean zombies, I mean they literally stop-motion-animate stuffed carcasses... and that's really the only thing to differentiate it from a traditional version. Therein lies the problem.
2009/03/04 Oh hey it's Wednesday! Almost forgot! Molly Ringwold and Winston help defeat a guy who's half crane called Overdog. Enjoy. Aside from just plain forgetting what day it was, part of the delay here is that I could have sworn I had one of these for Barbarella. Turns out all I have in the backlog are this, some grade-A ultra-cheese, and a two-parter on 4th edition D&D. So... now is a really good time to recommend some severely messed up things for me to watch.
2009/02/25 This week marks the end of our time with Devilman Woman. At least on my end. If you're crazy enough to have read all this and still feel compelled to actually watch it, well, you've been more than warned. Speaking of warnings, in this week's mention of the previews? I fully endorse Mazinkaiser, but Kekko Kamen? That's sarcasm. Someone once described it as being "about a female superhero who fights crime while wearing a red mask and boots." Think about that statement with your mind as far in the gutter as you can cram it. Yeah.
2009/02/18 Middle of the week! Devilman Woman! We're getting close to the end and the plot is starting to go off the rails. As an unfortunate side effect, my summaries are becoming larger and more unwieldly. On the upside though, this week we resolve a good many mysteries and plot twists (many of which having only begun about 5 minutes beforehand), including the mystery of the inconsistent nipples!
2009/02/16 Middle of the month! Devil's Advocate! Today we take a look at Metroid Prime 3, because people are strangely averse to doing that. We're also coming in a day late because, well, con on the horizon, new area getting ready to go into RetroMUD, and I am, obviously, smack dab in the target audience for Retro Game Challenge.
2009/02/11 This week's thoughts on Devilman Woman are something of a let-down next to last week's. No attempts are really made to maintain the levels of full-on-frelled-up from ep 13, and none of the monsters really jumped out as screen grab-worthy. I potentially made up with it by rambling incoherently though, so hey. We also begin here a line of questioning on the appropriateness of drawing nipples which, seriously, factors into a big reveal down the line.
2009/02/04 It's Wednesday! You know what that means, right kids? It means we're going to talk some more about Devilman Woman... and it's finally getting to the point where it's decidedly inappropriate for kids! In addition to some more wonderfully messed up monster designs, this week's batch of episodes includes episode 13. Episode 13 of Devilman Woman is very... special. So special that I left the note at the bottom from the original e-mail version of these, making reference to Gmail's browser ads, which, tragically, aren't to be found here.
2009/01/29 Just threw up what we're going to call a rant, but it's really more of a cry for help. Or a real downer of a resume. Matter of perspective really.
2009/01/28 We continue our discussion of Devilman Woman. Still not as mindblasting as one might expect it to be, but this week's batch of thoughts does contain one of the few screengrabs I managed to bring myself to capture for you, showcasing what may be the best monster design in the entire series. I'm not going to spoil it for you here.

Also, shot in the dark here, but is anyone who's reading this in the vicinity of Mansfield, Mass. by any chance? I'm hitting a con there late next month, so if anyone wants to stalk me and/or let me save on expenses by crashing on their couch, let me know.
2009/01/21 So begins the 6-part spilling of my running thoughts regarding Devilman Woman, which I received as a Christmas present from my grandmother 2 years ago. Things start off pretty tame here, but in the coming weeks, you will understand how wrong that is.
2009/01/15 I am really doing a lousy job of getting these Devil's Advocate posts up in the AM. Shame on me. Anyway, this month we have Conker's Bad Fur Day, which I believe is the last game that's really been nagging at me to chat it up. I'm sure I have at least enough material to get through the year if I put some thought into it, but the pile's starting to shrink down enough that shouting suggestions at me might not be a bad idea.

Oh, and I'm going to try and get these consciousness stream posts (see below) up as a weekly thing for as long as I can manage, so check back on Wednesdays for a while to see me being horrified by Devilman Woman in several installments.
2009/01/14
 This is probably going to totally mess up my formatting here, but oh well. I've made up a bunch of sloppy banner ads, and started posting them around the internet via that whole Project Wonderful deal. I really need to replace them with something more professional, but hey, they're bringing in hits. Those hits haven't been leading to purchases though, so I also just lopped $15 off the price of the thing. Might be permanent, might be temporary. If it'll actually sell, cool, I'll keep it cheap, survive off direct sales. If it doesn't, it has to go back up because retail stores hate being undersold, and want a discount which honestly, is so ridiculous that even at $60 I personally see like, 2 bucks. So anyway, spread the word.

Also, that Fritz the Cat thing? That went over pretty well, so I'm going to make this a semi-regular feature I guess. There's a limit on how much I can do, because the source material has to be really messed up, I have to be seeing it for the first time, and I need to have a keyboard handy, but I kinda have a backlog in the form of old e-mails. So uh, here's another one.

OK... this formatting is still off. Uh... let's see, oh hey! It's the 14th! New DA tomorrow! Don't really know what it'll be on, but you probably do because who checks this on the 14th?
2009/01/05 Hey look! It's a non-DA article! Been a while! A week ago I was actually planning to post this extremely long article on what the player, GM, and designer are obligated to bring to the table for an RPG campaign to go smoothly, but it failed to save properly. I'll have to rewrite it, but it's hard to do that after you lose an entire day's work. Anyway, enjoy this thing here, and then let me know you enjoyed it so I can justify following it up with what's alluded to at the end.
2008/12/16 The DA for this month is Indigo Prophecy. Apparently the same dev team is working on a similar game called Heavy Rain, which scores points for lacking holographic sun destroying supermen locked in a secret war with Mayan time traveling high priests and such, but it loses points for dropping the nice easy QTE interface for rapidly moving face-button indicators.
2008/11/15 This month's Devil's Advocate is extra special. The game in question is one of the first ones I wanted to feature here. The only reason it's taken so long is that, quite frankly, when someone mails you a copy of the game at their expense just to be rid of it, you want to establish some credibility before you go claiming that it's actually pretty fun.

Oh, and the WDL site should be updating again shortly, with exciting new developments. So, look forward to that.
2008/10/16 I found myself in a tricky predicament for this month's Devil's Advocate. It's October, so it just wouldn't be right not to feature some sort of horror game. Unfortunately, I've already used all of the best games for a proper theme already. The other good survival horror games out there are all too popular (with the presumptive exception of half a dozen games I've yet to play). The Shin Megami Tensen games are thematically appropriate, but the only one I've played and enjoyed is Persona 3, which doesn't need me pushing it. Nor does Diablo 2, as topical as it would be. In the end, it came down to either Indigo Prophecy (maybe later), versus the original survival horror franchaise, Ecco the Dolphin. If you think I'm joking, read on.

Oh, and if anyone would like some more obviously horror themed reads for the month, you're all more than welcome to drop me an e-mail extolling the virtues of Siren, or Fatal Frame, or Blue Stinger, or Carrier... come to think of it, there are a surprising number of obscure Dreamcast horror games, aren't there. If they're decently written, I might toss up a bonus update on Halloween with them. Just tossing me a list of what's unfairly left in the shadow of Resident Evil and Silent Hill and making sure I have things to dig up next year works too.
2008/09/15 Rieko Kodama Appreciation Vague Time Period continues with this month's Devil's Advocate. Last month's was delayed due to false accusations by my ISP of piracy. This month, we discuss Skies of Arcadia. Near miss on the humorous coincidence front. A couple quick notes for this month's selection by the way. The only place I could find a good shot of a reef was my own earlier review of the game. That last screen isn't a cutscene, that's a fairly typical boss fight (although a lousy screen really, can barely make your ship out). As Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger in no way shape or form fit the criteria of this feature, this should be the last entry with anything close to these levels of glowing praise. I'll be switching back to the proper spirit of things shortly.
2008/08/15 I'm a little late with this month's Devil's Advocate because my ISP decided to shut me down on grounds of being some sort of Fiendish Video Pirate. Rather baffling really since I honestly avoid ever pirating anything. That by the way is the reason the screens in this month's selection, Phantasy Star so thoroughly fail to do the game justice. I could have grabbed much better with an emulator if I was actually into that scene. Apparently yon ISP is unaware that there are actually legitimate file distribution methods involving torrents. That or they just wanted an excuse to bust my bandwidth down.

In any case, this month is the start of Rieko Kodama appreciation... vague period of time. Over the next couple months, we'll also be covering Skies of Arcadia, Panzer Dragoon Saga, and... actually, I'll probably skip over the Sakura Wars series, seeing how they're import-only and I haven't played the ones that really deserve the praise.
2008/07/15 We have an extra special emergency edition of Devil's Advocate this month. Alone in the Dark 5 is actually still on store shelves, gathering dust, because reviewers want it to be a different game. Let's help turn it into a sleeper hit, or at least, let's everyone reading this grab it at depressingly discounted prices and have a great time with it.

In other news, Blatantly Loathesome, my shameless KoL clone, is really coming along these days. It will most likely quietly slip into open beta testing next week or so. My in-game calendar for it is set up in such a way that the first in-game year officially starts in roughly 18 days, so I suppose that's a good time limit on getting it to release status.
2008/06/15 Another month, another Devil's Advocate. I was very tempted to do something topical this month, either focusing on one of the source-games for Chaos Wars there, but it doesn't really deserve the tie-in treatment, or finding the most underrated Hideo Kojima game, but everyone else seems to have already run with the idea of pointing out how surprisingly awesome Metal Gear 2 (note the lack of Solid here) is. I also considered giving myself a birthday present by talking up Skies of Arcadia, or the original Phantasy Star. Eventually though I just said the-heck-with-it and went with Vanguard Bandits.
2008/06/09 So, for my birthday, someone gave me a copy of Chaos Wars. It's a Super Robot Wars style crazy crossover TRPG featuring characters pulled from the most obscure collection of games you're ever going to see. To give you some idea, the most recognizable characters are from Shadow Hearts, Growlanser, and Gungrave. One would think this sucker would get an instant upgrade to the head of the line for a Devil's Advocate feature, seeing how it potentially trumps Koudelka in terms of marketting to a niche that can't have many people besides me in it. One would also think that no publisher with any clue what they're doing would ever dream of releasing this in the U.S. One would be spot on with one of these assumptions. I'm not going to say the translation is worse than Wild ARMs 2, because at least here nobody tried to add "humor" to what babelfish spat out.

In other news, this browser game I'm fiddling with is starting to take form. Should be putting it into alpha testing soon.
2008/05/21

This week, there's been a sudden spike in the traffic to this site, which serves as a reminder how badly I need to clean things up. The main navigation links on here, at the moment, are pointing to a lot of things I haven't even thought about in a good 5 years or so, and the important stuff is rather hidden. Until I get a chance to properly fix that...

Hello new readers! Here's the stuff I'd like for you all to take a look at while you're here.

  • First and foremost, there's my tabletop game publishing company whose catalog at the moment includes an intentionally cheesy RPG, and more significantly The Massive Vs. The Masses. A two player strategy game based on old Godzilla movies and such.
  • Recently, I've also been getting a lot of feedback for my Devil's Advocate reviews. A new one goes up the 15th of every month, and the idea is to shine a light on a game that either nobody has really heard of, or has an undeserved reputation of being a piece of garbage.
  • Recently, I've also been getting a lot of feedback for my Devil's Advocate reviews. A new one goes up the 15th of every month, and the idea is to shine a light on a game that either nobody has really heard of, or has an undeserved reputation of being a piece of garbage.
  • My Game Talk essays don't seem to generate a lot of feedback, but if you're interested in long-winded shpiels about game design theory (or my amusingly morbid take on the plot of Silent Hill), I'd recommend them.
  • For some freebies, there's also the simple games list.
  • I'm always forgetting to bring it up, but I've been known to contribute new content to RetroMUD here and there. That's "MUD" as in "oldschool text-based MMORPG." It's free to play, there's a crazy amount of depth and content to it, the actual game itself is challenging enough not to degenerate into a chat room with a combat system like a lot of others.
  • Past that, there's just a lot of weird random old stuff that may or may not be amusing. I'm the sort of person who will leave the embarassing old content from when 10 years ago on my page just in case someone still cares.

Oh, and I've kind of been in hyperfocus mode for the last couple of weeks working on a new browser-based game notion which with a little luck might actually spring into being soon. No promises, but keep an eye out for it over the next month or so.

2008/05/15 This month's Devil's Advocate manages to actually be topical, focusing on a frequently overlooked step in the evolution of the Grand Theft Auto series, Space Station Silicon Valley. There's better pre-GTA3 games from DMA I might have hit, but Lemmings isn't exactly rotting in obscurity.
2008/04/26 OK. I hate to imply anything bad about people I generally respect, but I feel obligated to make this observation more publicly. here's some photos of MvM. The game I've been selling for the last year, and spent the last few shoving in the face of every big publisher and random congoer I came across. here's some photos of prototypes for Monsterpocalypse. The game Privateer Press is putting out this fall. Now, I'm not going to start pointing fingers or anything here, but that second photo on their page has a couple tanks, a couple helicopters, a giant robot, and what's either a death ray or a dead ringer for the old-protoype-art of The Lab on the left and some random skyscrapers on the right, with some arbitrarily grassy space between'em with a road cutting through.

If nothing else, I think the resemblence here is enough to warrant some serious discussion in a more high profile venue than this page. It also couldn't hurt to have some discussion in the relatively new WDL Message Boards, which oddly enough are currently a lower profile venue than my more-or-less-monthly updated personal page. These boards just need some chatter in general really.
2008/04/15 For this month's Devil's Advocate I was originally planning to cover Dead Rising. While getting ready to do so however, I noticed that the copy I own is actually a Greatest Hits rerelease. Apparently, despite some bad first impressions here and there, at the present everyone seems to acknowledge what a spiffy game it is, making it disqualified from my feature. BoF5 would have made a great fallback, having the same main gimmick and dev team, but it'd read an awful lot like last month's entry, and I really wanted to throw in a non-RPG for a change of pace here. So this month it's going to be something you likely have played but didn't enjoy. Prince of Persia: Warrior Within.
2008/03/15 Time for a new Devil's Advocate. This week I go off on a bit of a tear on the weirdos who refuse to believe that Koudelka is the first game in the Shadow Hearts series, but hopefully make up with it by providing a crash course in RPG developer geneology.
2008/03/09 I just remembered I had most of a gametalk essay on alignments sitting around waiting for posting, so enjoy. It's a bit of a long one, and thus divided into two still pretty lengthy discussions.
2008/03/07 There's a new rant up on this year's NonCon and TempleCon, along with a summary of what I accomplished (or didn't) over the last year on the WDL page. They generally don't overlap.

By the way, the whole Devil's Advocate notion really seems to be going over well with people, and a number of other sites seem to be launching eerily similar concepts. This of course means that I'll have to hold off on covering Dragon Quarter until everyone else is done with it.
2008/02/15 Here's another Devil's Advocate feature. This month it's Wild ARMs. Oh, and for the curious, next month's will most likely be Koudelka. After that I'll be branching out some and covering a game that's neither an RPG nor on the PlayStation.

Oh, and don't forget NonCon is next weekend, come hang out if you can.
2008/01/15 Remember when I updated this page on a daily basis? There's no way I'm ever going to get to that point again, but I am starting a new monthly feature up this year which, hopefully, I'll be able to keep going for the next year or so. The short version- I (and possibly some other old internet curmudgeons you know and love) write nice little praise filled reviews of videogames that in most people's books are terrible, but honestly aren't bad. I'm starting off with one of the less controversal choices to ease us in, Parasite Eve.

In other news, I'll be at both TempleCon and NonCon in the next couple months. I've been bad enough about updating this page over the last year that my hyping of last year's NonCon isn't too far down. TempleCon is going to be a new one for me, and I should really start properly gearing up for it.

On the table for both for what it's worth, space and time allowing are MvM (all shiny and on sale), Collision (pretty nice for a dev/demo build), Red Shirt (rules fixed to be fun, dev/demo cards still nasty and smudgey), and MAYBE Starship Kyuceus if I can come up with a way of easily transporting/assembling all these maps and minis. Come to think of it, I've never even MENTIONED SK here have I? I'll have to fix that later.
Daily Thought Black Sheep, in addition to having a truly wonderful premise (people being killed by zombie-weresheep) also has surprisingly good execution. Lots of hat tips to stuff like Shaun of the Dead, Dead Alive, Army of Darkness, and even Holy Grail in there. I highly recommend it if that's your sort of thing.
2007/10/31 Rant up. Demo went well. Me sleep now.
2007/10/30 The WDL page has been a lot more exciting than this one lately. MvM's shipping, running demos in New York tomorrow and CT on the 10th. If none of that interests you, wow are you tenacious, I haven't had an update on anything else since March. I'll most likely throw something up for you tomorrow though, because it's a yearly tradition of mine to always update on Halloween... no wait, it's a yearly tradition to see how far into Koudelka I can get without saving then toss on a costume and find someone young enough to take trick-or-treating and not seem like a creepy old weirdo. Still, expect an update. Might go up at like 5 AM, but I'll get SOMETHING up.
2007/08/26 Reading up recently about the whole online gaming table notion WotC is planning to crosspromote with 4th Edition D&D reminded me about my own Toybox Project. Have I ever mentioned this before? In any case, personally, I'm not going to have time to do anything with it anytime soon, so, seeing how the whole concept is intended as an open source, freeware program, I've expanded my concept page for it here so that anyone with enough Python experience and free time that wants to get the ball rolling can take a stab at the most basic elements here.
2007/08/19 Haven't updated any of these here webpages in forever. Here's something of note though! The WDL page now has a working online store where you can pre-order MvM (which will be out soon, really!) and actually buy my horrifyingly sexist Barbarian RPG. If the latter sells well, I'll follow it up with some of these other half-baked one-shot oriented RPG-lets I have sitting around.
2007/07/21 Let's scroll off this financial panic here. Since I last updated, I collected enough credit experience to level up and can now afford to finish funding this here game. Huzzah!
2007/06/01 Wow... I haven't come up for air here in way too long. I generally make an effort to update this page 4 times a month at least. So uh... here's the deal. I need money. Not in the sense that I wish I had more money so I could buy some cool toys. In the sense that I have something like $10,000 in credit card debt which must be paid off in August, racked up paying for most of the costs of MvM here. That should have been enough to pay for all of it, but a couple suppliers of raw materials waited until after I'd already ordered the rest to say "Oh, we were several thousand dollars short on that last estimate we gave you, sorry." Now, those who keep tabs on these things may recall that I have no means of income, and a few people really in the know might be aware that thanks to some spinal damage from a childhood disease, I'm certifiably unemployable. So, if I can't scrape up the money, yon credit card companies get to fight over my various value holding assets. These pretty much boil down to a darn impressive library of ancient videogames, but those unfortunately go by monetary value instead of sentimental value. So... taking everything I own still wouldn't pay this debt off.

So yeah. I need money. Not so much to pay off the credit card debt as to pay for the boards for MvM (sales for that paying off all the debt in theory, or I'd pay the debt off and then use the card again for the rest, either way). So... how will I get this money? Through a combination of the following:
  • Presales of MvM- I don't really want to do this because it feels kinda sleazy, but if I presold 100 copies, that'd solve things no problem, and if I fail to get the money, I can still get at least 100 copies out there with somewhat compromised boards if it really comes down to it.
  • Selling other things to get by- I'm doing some last minute obsessive fiddling with Glistening Chests here, to sell it online as a PDF for 5 or 10 bucks (probably 10, it's bulking up enough for it). This isn't enough to do me much good unless 500 or so people really wanna play this thing, but every little bit helps. I'll do more like this if I can swing it too.
  • Out and out begging for money- I really don't like asking people for handouts as a matter of personal pride, but if anyone is feeling really philanththropic, and either wanna toss me cash in wads of sizes other than $10 or $50 (or you just don't want my games), then hey, knock yourselves out:
Don't use that paypal link to place actual orders for games though, wait for the real order buttons to appear on the WDL site. Makes my book-keeping easier, and I have my paypal account set to take huge cuts from what people send me for reasons that made sense at the time.

The best thing you can do to help me out at this point though is find other people to pitch in. This page has, shall we say, an "intimate" audience these days.
2007/04/19 So, panicking over the cost of MvM here, and the amount of time I have in which to pay off the massive credit card bills it's racking up, the thought hits me that I really need a secondary source of income with less overhead. So what I'm pondering at the moment is taking all these little jokey "light" RPGs I have kicking around in a half-finished state, polishing them up, and selling them as PDFs for $5. There's RPG the RPG, wherein all the PCs sit around playing RPGs, there's Glistening Chests, the game that exists so the whole line of "Female armor offers more protection the less it covers" has an actual game to be a rule in, and I could have sworn there was a third. Anyone remember me rambling about it?
2007/03/31 Coming up pretty close on what I seriously hope is going to be the release date for MvM here, I'm hitting some just plain silly road blocks. Like, for stickers to label the little plastic pieces with? First estimate I got back was $1.50 per copy of the game. Finally have some photos of the Gamorzilla prototypes though, and they look quite nice. I'd pass'em along, but at this point, might as well wait until I get'em in and can take some photos of their shiny metal glory.
2007/03/12 New Gametalk essay up. Expounding on my thoughts about randomness. Too tired to get into it more here, so just read it.
2007/03/08 OK, I finally have this year's NonCon report up. Sorry that too so long. I'm also getting delivery dates for missing MvM components, so I can indeed deliver on the date promised on the WDL page.
2007/03/05 My usual NonCon report hasn't been written yet, as I'm still in a creative spurt, jotting down improvements for Collision before I work on getting it published. In the meantime, I did write a short, demo-centric report for the World Domination LLC page. Anyway though, back to adding in some of that lovely added value to Collision. More specifically, diagrams of a few different board configurations that can add some variety to the game.
2007/02/24 NonCon has a full events schedule posted. I'll probably get around to updating mine to match it later on. I also have all my game demos ready to go, finally. I don't want to look at any primary colors for a while now.
2007/02/13 Found out the more permanent bits of my schedule for NonCon, updated my NonCon page accordingly. I also just realized that I never mentioned getting board samples for MvM in. They're just plain amazing.
2007/02/06 OK, the Gamorzilla pieces are still distressingly in limbo, but all the army pieces just arrived today. 60,000 little plastic pieces are stacked up in cardboard boxes behind me right now. Rather freaky. Good news on the fronts of boards and cards too. As are Red Shirt cards. Just generally good news today.
2007/01/31 Getting MvM ready for sale at NonCon may be looking less and less likely lately, but Red Shirt and Collision are coming along great. Collision's been ready to go since like a week after getting the idea, just need to make time to make enough pieces for 12 players. Red Shirt meanwhile is coming together much more smoothly now that I've gone and invested in a 24 DVD boxed set of research material. I'm averaging about 4 new cards a day, out of a 108 card set and I'm about half done. The tricky part is going to be getting the text to fit and the illustrations to not totally suck.
2007/01/29 OK, it seems NonCon is now a little under 5 weeks away, and I am, accordingly, Stressing The Frell Out over the state of things. There are, currently, two main things delaying Massive Vs. Masses' actual retail release. One of these is an internal issue, the result of a massive chain of bad rolls on the encounter table of life keeping files from getting to people who need them so they can start printing things. The other is the disturbing silence coming from the studio sculpting/casting the Gamorzilla pieces. Sent the down payment back in February, haven't heard a thing since. That's the one really worrying me. Printing delays aren't a biggie, because I should at least have samples, maybe rush an order on a few copies. The pieces though are worrying.
2007/01/17 So, with NonCon fast approaching and 3 or 4 games needing my attention, what does my personal muse pester me to work on? Legends of Ardeas. The RPG which won't be ready for public consumption until I write another thousand pages and contract a bunch of artists to do a truckload of illustrations. Of course. This past weekend's efforts yielded a much needed pile of mythology, monsters, and historical events which should provide future GMs with plenty of fodder for adventure hooks.
2007/01/16 Today I officially an order through for the Army pieces for the first Massive Vs. Masses print run. In addition to pushing me that much further into the realm of horrifying credit debt, this means that tomorrow (or so) 60,000 little plastic pieces are being packed up to be mailed to me. They will then be shoved into a corner of my bedroom until all the thousands of boards and cards and so forth finally arrive, and then comes the fun of packing everything into boxes to ship out to people.

Sadly, it's looking like all those other things won't be here until a week or so AFTER NonCon, so I'd better make darn sure these other games are polished up nicely. I should still have samples of everything MvM mind you, so you'll be able to see what you'll hopefully be paying for later, I just won't be able to sell copies at the con (well, preorders maybe).
2007/01/03 For a fair deal of time now, I've been having this conversation: "I have this rather ambitious RPG I'm working on, but at the moment, it's sidelined by a need for some thousand year old census data." Then they ask why, I explain, and they look at me funny. Tonight though, the other person actually happened to have a big stack of books on the subject on hand, so, yeah, that worked out quite nicely.
2006/12/16 OK, it seems I have finally reached the point where I'm sending e-mails around between various printers and Silk hashing out details about image resolutions and such. This is, in a way, far more stressful, but much much less scary than the previous phase of trying to pin down reps I can establish such dialogs with, and working out a budget. Everything should come together around late February, as I've largely been banking on here it looks like, unless some really horrible complication comes up.

Also, NonCon's website has been down since the very day I confirmed I'd be a guest speaker again this year. Today they tossed up a temporary page to look at while waiting to get noncon.net back up and running. Nothing really on it at the moment, but it did give me access to their mascot, which let me make the pseudo-banner on the WDL page more amusing (or possibly even tackier looking, I really need to get more outside opinions there, having turned off my own sense of aesthetics years ago to design THIS website).
2006/12/14 I smacked the World Domination LLC site around a bit today. It's still very ugly and placeholder filled, but at least I made the top row of navigation links look passable. Possibly even good. Incidently, this was one of those things that would have taken 5 minutes in a real graphics program, but was an arduous one-pixel-at-a-time using my Vintage 1988 Technology.
2006/12/12 OK, so way back when, I went and officially filled out the paperwork to start a company with a name I found quite amusing. I haven't mentioned it here though because, well, I wanted to make sure I had the matching domain name registered first. That, of course, I was putting off until I had a website to attach to it, which would have been another few months, but I needed an url to get me an ISBN to slap on my games when they come out. So the good news is, I can finally tell you all that I have a company called World Domination LLC. The bad news is, that there link goes to a fairly embarassing wad of placeholders.
2006/12/11 Various minor updates here. The NonCon crew have arisen from their year long slumber, so hopefully I'll have some semblence of a schedule to post soon. I've managed to collect the required materials to get Collision here playable by up to 12 people. The first Massive Vs. Masses set should be back from the printers in time to be selling copies for the aforementioned con, and Red Shirt... I really need to buckle down and get playable. Same with this other game... I should probably get my official Game Company Type Website up and running soon too. I was planning to get some Actual Content ready first, but I don't think there's room in the schedule.
2006/12/04 That game I mentioned 2 days ago? I just ran a quick test game with a few people. Quite fun. It's definitely coming with me to NonCon. I should really start throwing together a list of these things. <
2006/12/02 Yet another game has sprang unbidden into my head. Theoretically I should have a whole box full of new toys to show off at NonCon this year, which would seem to be from March 2-4 this year.
2006/11/30 Even more progress on the front of getting everything ready to go today. Sadly, nothing I can take pictures of yet though.
2006/11/29 OK, things are really moving on the MvM front lately. Cards and pieces have gone into production, so in a month or two, there should be plenty of actual final product type things to post pictures of.
2006/11/27 This is funny. The day after I finish sketching out the basics of all the mission cards for Red Shirt here, a whopping 4 channels (most rather local) simultaniously start showing Classic Trek marathons. Would have been better if that happened a week earlier, but still, it's nice to be re-exposed to what may or may not be the primary inspiration for the game. In other Red Shirt news, preliminary testing proves that the rules are simple enough for even non-gamers to pick up on instantly. Good sign that.
2006/11/10 MvM cards should be going off to the printer within the next week. In the meantime, I've been doing a fair bit of Red Shirt work recently. Half the card list is in the can (featuring such horrible mission names as Timmy Z, Monster in the Mine, and Where Nobody Else Has Been Yet). It's looking like it should be playable by NonCon. Speaking of which, isn't this around the start of NonCon hype season? So far I don't see a website up yet for this year.
2006/10/29 You know, there's a fine line between an e-mail to a friend of mine, and a new rant. Honestly, that's how this whole site game into existence to begin with.
2006/10/27 Here's the first batch of Ardeas Racial Overviews for you. I was planning on throwing more into this collection, but I was distracted by fixing typos and formatting issues. Not happy with the wording of a lot of these too, but for a sample of a work in progress, I think it gets the point across nicely. At least it gives some idea of just how odd it's going to be playtesting the Faerie book.
2006/10/26 A few people have been hungry for new peeks at projects of mine. I'd post some samples of finalized MvM pieces in all their 3D plastic glory, but I can't find the firewire for this digital camera. So instead, I'm working on a nicely formatted collection of the basic overviews of several Ardeas races. This was something I had to do eventually anyway, as they will eventually serve as both basic teaser material, and art reference material, when I get around to publishing the sucker. Should be up in roughly 24 hours.
2006/09/30 Yet another notion for a one book gag-like RPG recently sprung to mind. It's a horribly embarassing premise inspired by the style of a particular artist who I'm hoping has a good enough sense of humor when it comes to his own work down the line, because I would honestly love to have him illustrate this.
2006/09/17 It's been quite some time since I've posted anything in Simple Games, but here's a new one for you: Engliti
2006/09/08 I've been gearing up to officially launch the website for my game publishing company for a while now, but there are two slight hiccups in the way. The first is working out what I'm going to do in terms of domain registration. First there's the fact that I suppose I'll have to actually go and work out the details on where I'm going to host it, and what channels to go through to get the domain properly pointed. I should have all this stuff down pat by now I know, but oddly, it's never come up for me.

The other issue is more practical. The basic site layout I have here looks rather awkward when there's only one game listed in the sidebar (mainly due to the big Our Games header). Therefore, I need something else to stick under it. Additional MvM sets are a given, but A- I'd like to hold off there a bit to get the first set well established, and B- I'd like my second publishing venture to be something that doesn't cost so much to produce. Various RPGs are tempting (I'm sure there's some demand for a major Tyranny revamp, and I'm having a lot of fun working on Ardeas lately), but in order to release something I could really be proud of, these all need to stew for another year or five.

The prime candidate therefore because this little project I've been keeping under my hat thus far. Here's the condensed pitch: It's a lighthearted card game with a somewhat black sense of humor. It's called Red Shirt (with all that implies). The basic way it plays out is that everyone is fighting over, well, Red Shirts, whose lives they then throw away to accomplish other goals. If the notion appeals to you at all, let me know, and I'll try to get a playable set made up for when I'm carting around the finished version of MvM. Don't expect much from the prototype's quality though. Expect better than the original MvM demo set, not nearly as nice as the current demo set. Think Battling Business Cards with color.
2006/08/18 OK. I think that's everything. The Massive Vs. The Masses: Gamorzilla Vs. The Army should be officially on sale around February or so, with nice fancy production values all around, for $40 or so. Just in time for... well, not Christmas, but spending checks you got for Christmas! Also, just in time for NonCon.
2006/08/17 Here's another "Doh! I didn't post that?" update. I found a nice little program for this sort of thing (LaTeX if you're curious). Using it, I threw the Ardeas Orcs notes I had scattered about into a single, nicely formatted book. The total page count thus far is roughly 100 pages. Once there's illustrations in here, and I add in all the details I plan to, it'll most likely come out to something like 400 pages. Good thing you're only ever going to need one book at a time here. Nicer looking sample pages will probably be floating around later.
2006/08/07 Doing a lot of Ardeas work recently. Someone got me into a campaign of a different (non-D&D) fantasy RPG whose have some Issues, but whose content bulk is great. In any case, as things have progressed to such a point, does anyone out there know a good freeware Mac program that can deliver stuff like this these days? All my old (pre-OSX) computers came with half a dozen, but I bought this one during the brief window between discontinuing Claris/Appleworks, and throwing one in to the iLife suite.
2006/08/04 Here's a new game talk essay on the notion of pressuring people into playing games. The short form is, you shouldn't work all day so you can afford to work a second job all night, but you'd be surprised how many ways people slip into that sort of trap.
2006/07/31 I believe I just located a source for the last component I need to start producing MvM. In celebration, I'm refocusing my efforts towards another project. Ardeas specifically. I just set up a wiki to gather research for some of the more detailed research on running/raiding cities. Publicly edittable, so feel free to poke around with it.
2006/07/23 Page two of my Haruhi review is now officially up for those who have seen it all.
2006/07/12 The problem with doing a ton of research is that it takes up a ton of time, but doesn't yield articles to post on this page. So today, we're mixing things up with a review of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which you should all watch by the way. Ideally while the fansubs are still in high circulation, otherwise it's the long wait through localization.
2006/06/22 I was planning a month long blitz of MvM updates, but there's a major traffic jam of sorts at hand here. To tide you over, here's a silly little rant for you. I think eventually, everyone's going to get invited to host Saturday Night Live. You need to be prepared for these things.
2006/06/09 Price estimates on board construction costs are STILL hanging. Dear gods. Anyone out there have a batch printer and the ability to custom make a cutting die?
2006/05/31 I've been getting a lot more progress made on the MvM front than it would seem lately, but a lot of it is fairly confidential. I officially own a company now, and I've been doing a lot of work designing a website for it. Don't have hosting set up quite yet though, but I should in a month. I've also worked out about half the manufacturing costs, and who I'll be paying them to, with the other half in the works. Funding for all of this is iffy, but again, should surface within the next month... I suppose you're free to blow off this progress log until then.
2006/05/30 One of the main delays in the completion of issue #1 is this panel right here, which is finally done, and looks pretty good... although it needs a fair deal of context, so you'll have to wait on seeing it.
2006/05/28 Here's a long rant with a political tone to it I meant to upload a week or so ago. A potentially scandelous exercise in common sense. Enjoy.
2006/05/18 I've been watching an awful lot of anime lately, and intend to revamp my anime page to reflect this shortly. For now, we have some mini-reviews of a couple promising shows that recently started airing in Japan.
2006/05/15 New rant of sorts up on the topic of Character Designers. It's really more of a crash course than a list of grievances though.
2006/05/06 More Game Talk to pass the time while we wait for something solid on the MvM front. I've got registration of the company pending, and quotes on half the materials. The sources I'm looking into on boards and custom designed plastic pieces though are going on a month now without replying to my initial inquiries. Feel free to make suggestions if you have a source on that sort of thing.
2006/04/26 Here's a Game Talk posting about Palladium and their recent problems for you. It will in all likelyhood get me some hate mail, but hey, just because I'm pointing it out doesn't mean I like it.
2006/04/15 New rant up. It's about the disturbing trend of people using 80s nostalgia who don't know enough about what they're talking about to even get the references right. Gripe all you want about people who use Optimus Prime as their go-to punchline, at least they get the name right.
2006/04/09 Here's the first snag in getting MvM out the door. The pieces. While I could probably cut the number down, what with how I've never seen as many units out on the board as I have in my prototype sets, there are 52 pieces in an MvM box. Plan A was to make every single one of them a nice little mini, made of plastic or metal, which would look nice, and make this a game that's good for supplying RPG props. However, I really don't want this sucker to have a price tag over $40, and based on current research, that would give me a profit margin of uh... -$10 or so per set. So... feel free to give me some input on which is the most appealing Plan B:
1- Raise the price to $60 and hope it doesn't scare everyone off.
2- Have all The Army's units be some sort of cheap little illustrated wood/cardboard discs.
3- Have said units be those "standee" deals. You know, where you punch out a strip of paper, fold it into a triangle, and use that for your piece. It worked for Battletech if I recall.

Personally, I'm leaning more towards C myself. Not only are they the cheapest option, they're also not flat. My current prototype sets all use wooden discs for units... which then sit on OTHER wooden discs at certain times, making things rather confusing. A little triangluar folded bit of paper though, while somewhat arts and crafts-y, stands out from the board, is easy to grip, and I honestly think they look better than the disc concept.
2006/04/08 It seems I'm going to be forming my own game publisher to get MvM out there. The reasons for this are as follows:
1- I have some really nice card art which other companies would ditch for stuff by their own artists... and I like what I have here more.
2- While I don't really think it would be an issue, there's a lot of piece of mind to be had when you have complete creative control (and legal rights) concerning your own stuff.
3- As it turns out, I have decent connections in terms of producing all the necessary materials without paying an arm and a leg, and know some crazy freaks willing to help with sales.
4- In addition to doing all this great artwork, my artist friend suggested an excessively amusing name for a company, which is as good a reason as any to found one.
2006/04/07 I took a new game from abstract concept to a first draft of the rules over the last day. More details on it should arise shortly.
2006/04/06 This is one of those times where I'm too busy working on stuff to keep you up to date on what's going on. Major work being done on the front of getting Massive Vs. Masses published. Unfortunately, today's efforts, while quite time consuming, yielded an end result I can't talk about publicly yet. Give it a week or so.
2006/03/22 Working on a crazy Retromud based project pretty heavily this week, more info when it's done presumably.
2006/03/21 Now that I seem to have very good odds of getting The Massive Vs. the Masses published within the year, I should really shift my focus to a new project. Therefore, I'll be doing some serious Ardeas work unless anyone wants to see progress on something else.
2006/03/20 Bit of inactivity around here. After NonCon came the flu, after the flu came GTS. In any case, I now have a number of potential publishers for The Massive Vs. The Masses. I'll need to send some e-mails around tomorrow.
2006/03/06 Another year, another NonCon report. The short form is, I had a blast, and feel a lot more confident about heading to GTS.
2006/03/03 Off I go to NonCon for the weekend.
2006/03/01 OK. After much extensive testing, I am now reasonably certain that all 6 Massive Vs. Masses sets have 50/50 odds of beating any of the others, with chances for come from behind victories. Woohoo.
2006/02/23 Making travel arrangements and other such preparations for next month have kept me rather busy lately, but a question which may become a rant later is on my mind. Is there a term for this phenomenon yet? The internet has spawned a great many odd little sub-cultures, and most are quite vocal about their existence. I've never heard anyone talk about their great love of turning videogame/anime characters into girls though, people just frequently send me pictures like this. Frequently. That directory just contains those which I found cleaning out direct file transfer dumps.

Oh, and incidently, you people do all see the mailto links at the top and bottom of every page on this site, right?
2006/02/20 As NonCon is less than two weeks away, today I worked out the full list of demos I plan to run. My NonCon page should be updated tomorrow to reflect it, but for now: Massive Vs. Masses, Tyranny. I was pondering Ardeas, but there's no real point teasing something that won't see daylight for so long.
2006/02/19 Pretty decent response to my Uncompromised Thoughts notion. Now to pick one. We have a movie I haven't seen, we have chess, which I've covered fairly well in a Game Talk essay... ah, here we go. The Shin Megami Tensei Series.
2006/02/16 Here's a proposal folks. Getting unbiased opinions these days is hard as heck. Professional reviewers aren't really allowed to tear into a lot of things, because the backlash would hurt them professionally. A good percentage of man on the street reviews are really ads placed by plants. All you can really trust is word of mouth, and honestly, odds are your friends don't have the proper grounding to really know what they're talking about.

Now, I'm told I write a good review. I've gotten paid to do so many a time, I don't recall ever having someone chew me out for making a bad recommendation about anything, and I'm the obsessive type who won't give an opinion on, say, a weird head-trip anime series without first researching their history and seeing several others. All you have to worry about with me is me compromising my integrity to keep from upsetting publishers/authors/directors/raging fanboys, and I'm pretty sure none of those sorts pay any particular attention to this page. So here's the proposal.

Send me an e-mail asking me about something. Anything. Game, movie, TV show, web site, company, person, type of food, whatever. If I have the appropriate experience to do so, I will then post, to a new section here, My Complete, Uncompromised Thoughts on whatever it is. If I think it'll hurt feelings, I just won't post it. If I can't afford to review something, you might be able to paypal me what it'd cost me to cover it, but no promises. I won't, for example, watch the House of the Dead movie even if you pay me, and I don't have the time to go watch every single episode of Dr. Who.

There's a catch though. Nobody is allowed to complain about the end result. Not to me, not to your friends, not even to yourself. If I say I couldn't stand your favorite movie, you can't get ticked off. Just accept that we have differing opinions. If I say your favorite game is a piece of garbage, you have to accept that you have irrational affection for a piece of garbage. I don't throw around that sort of language unless there's non-subjective, demonstrable evidence that it is, in fact, garbage. If you can't deal with that, don't read the reviews.

So, assuming you want some truly honest info about something you want to check out, tell me where to start.
2006/02/15 Today was spent sending e-mails to various people in the interest of furthering causes that benefit you guys, so yay.
2006/02/14 Tomorrow is the last day I am scheduled to be programming stuff. I think I am now officially behind schedule there.
2006/02/13 Today I got a form rejection letter from a publisher I first courted over a year ago. On the one hand, this sucks, since I know they won't publish it, but on the other hand, I no longer have to keep saying "Well, I'm still waiting to hear from company X, but..." when talking to other people.
2006/02/12 Much less boring coding stuff today. Something compiled!
2006/02/11 Lots more boring coding stuff today.
2006/02/10 Lots of boring coding stuff today.
2006/02/09 Two rants in two days I know, but this is sentiment really needed to be voiced.
2006/02/08 I'm going to tease this here rant with a small quote. "It's rare that you'll see a cookiecutter romantic comedy for instance, where 70 minutes in, a futuristic biker gang starts rampaging through the city and kills most of the cast."
2006/02/06 This here is a Battling Business Card. If you participate in my demos at this year's NonCon, you can get one. Fill it out, and you get to pull an item from The Box of Free Crud!*

*Box may or may not contain the surplus from my anime auction.
2006/02/02 Let it never be said that I am not above plugging stuff for spiffy people:

In affiliation with No Such Convention

From Squire to Knight - WORLD PREMIERE
Classical Compositions on a Console RPG theme

Erica Kudisch, Vassar '06, presents a concert of her original music using texts and themes from the Final Fantasy Series, Vagrant Story, Xenogears, Suikoden, and Chrono Trigger. In addition to performances by prominent classical musicians Todd Crow, the Tourmaline Quartet, Sylvia Buccieli and Ann Churukian, the concert features students of the college. 2 PM, Saturday March 4th, Skinner Hall.
2006/02/01 Got about halfway done loading one of the newish MvM sets into The Intesive Playtesting Apparatus. AKA the java version of the game. You'd be surprised how much it helps to have a computer shuffling cards for you when you're still fine-tuning things.
2006/01/30 Updated (would that be the right term?) the maps from my last D&D campaign to reflect that the next one will be set in the same world roughly 2000 years earlier. This has only the vaguest possible impact on the life of anyone reading this, but they can't all be productive days.
2006/01/29 Some time ago, I started throwing notes onto this page regarding a particularly long running D&D campaign I ran. The good news is, I'm expanding on those quite a bit today. The bad news is, I'm yanking them off the site for now, as they contain massive spoilers for players of the campaign I'm starting up when I return from the GAMA trade show this March.
2006/01/28 The thought process leading up to it is rather complex, and will likely be the topic of a rant soon, but for now, assuming you're mature enough to handle such images, please enjoy this picture of the girls from Anecrophilia reclining on a wall, completely topless.
2006/01/27 Finished updating these archives. All the links and images should be working now.
2006/01/26 More work on fixing the site up. While I was at it, I added the links in for issue 1 chapter 3 on the Anecrophilia panel index.
2006/01/25 Doing some major site maintenance this week. Step one, taking the year and change worth of updates crowding up the index and archiving them properly. Also added a new little feature to the top of the page.
2006/01/24 Lots of dusting off of various projects. Expect some interesting updates soon. Oh, and my massive financial crisis seems to be dying down to something more managable now, but you're welcome to keep tossing cash at me if you feel like it. Everyone who tossed me some so far has, of course, been added to the future free stuff recipient list.
2006/01/15 For the last few years I've been meaning to make these. "Battling Business Cards" I call'em. You'll see what they are if you come to NonCon.
2006/01/14 That donation drive there managed to get me some non-ramen meals and just barely managed to restore my internet access. To celebrate, here's a new rant. Now then, it's January, so I suppose I should see what's going on with NonCon this year.
2005/12/Ar Full Archives

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