Welcome to this week's caption contest. The winner, who will be announced on Friday, will get a free t-shirt from the NeatoShop!
So look around the NeatoShop and type in your choice of t-shirt with your caption. Submit only one caption per comment, but you can leave as many comments as you like. Please make sure that you provide a t-shirt selection or your caption will not be considered.
So the geekosphere has been abuzz all week with the superhero cosplay wedding of Sharon and Neil Vaughan. The bride and groom were dressed as Wonder Woman and Batman, respectively, and guests attended as heroes and villains of various affiliations and universes.
I had a fairly traditional church wedding, which was nice and memorable. But I wonder if it would have been fun to have a geek wedding, perhaps with a Star Trek theme (since Trek is eternal).
If you were to have a geeky wedding, what theme would you go for?
When I was 10 years old, I got my first computer. It was a Mac Plus, and I used it mostly to play video games. There are some that I fell in love with and would love to play again. Alas, none of them are available to me in a usable form.
The Ancient Art of War (1984) by Brøderbund. This, and its sequel, The Ancient Art of War at Sea, were my introduction to strategy games. Troops consisted of armored knights, unarmored barbarians, and archers. There were forts where soldiers could get a defensive advantage and villages where they could get resupplied. Best of all, you could design your own scenarios in great detail.
Enchanted Scepters (1984) by Silicon Beach. This was a simple point-and-click adventure game about Saber, a hero who must retrieve four mystical scepters from distant lands in order to protect the kingdom from an invasion. Through great effort, I was able to get three of the scepters, but never the fourth.
Dark Castle (1986) by Silicon Beach and its sequel, Beyond Dark Castle, were arcade-style games about Duncan, a prince who must rescue his kingdom from the Black Knight. He enters the trap-filled castle of the Black Knight, defeats his minions, overcomes physical obstacles, and finally encounters the powerful game boss himself. I loved the challenge this game posed to my motor coordination skills.
Hidden Agenda (1988) by Springboard. You play the leader of an imaginary Central American nation called Chimerica in the 1980s. The country has just experienced a revolution and overthrown its US-friendly, but totalitarian government. Various factions are vying for power, and you're in the crossfire as El Presidente. Your goal is to stay in power for three years. This is exceptionally hard, as you face coups from within your government, right-wing and left-wing forces, and American and Soviet-backed agents. The key, I discovered, is to take as centrist a position as possible. The priest, for example, has big plans for the nation's agriculture. Make him Defense Minister. The ex-guerilla likewise has plans for the nation's military. Make him Agriculture Minister. Try to keep both the Americans and the Soviets happy -- or at least not furious at you.
Which old, lost games would you love to play again?
Welcome to this week's caption contest. The winner, who will be announced on Friday, will get a free t-shirt from the NeatoShop!
So look around the NeatoShop and type in your choice of t-shirt with your caption. Submit only one caption per comment, but you can leave as many comments as you like. Please make sure that you provide a t-shirt selection or your caption will not be considered.
One of the facets of Babylon 5 that I really enjoyed was its realistic depiction of economics. B5 was a departure from the utopian economy of Star Trek where scarcity -- as well as money -- had been largely eliminated. In Babylon 5, there were unions that went on strike and frequent shortages of labor, parts, and just plain cash. A large population of desperately poor people lived on the station in a region called "Downbelow", and a number of major characters dealt with unemployment, indebtedness, and worries about paying their bills.
Scarcity, both for societies as a whole and individuals, was a driving force in the Babylon 5 storyline. So it's a lot like the world that we live in. I liked that.
Which science fiction books, movies, or television shows do you think do a good job of presenting realistic economics?
Welcome to this week's caption contest. The winner, who will be announced on Friday, will get a free t-shirt from the NeatoShop!
So look around the NeatoShop and type in your choice of t-shirt with your caption. Submit only one caption per comment, but you can leave as many comments as you like. Please make sure that you provide a t-shirt selection or your caption will not be considered
Welcome to this week's caption contest. The winner, who will be announced on Friday, will get a free t-shirt from the NeatoShop!
So look around the NeatoShop and type in your choice of t-shirt with your caption. Submit only one caption per comment, but you can leave as many comments as you like. Please make sure that you provide a t-shirt selection or your caption will not be considered.
Welcome to this week's caption contest. The winner, who will be announced on Friday, will get a free t-shirt from the NeatoShop!
So look around the NeatoShop and type in your choice of t-shirt with your caption. Submit only one caption per comment, but you can leave as many comments as you like. Please make sure that you provide a t-shirt selection or your caption will not be considered.
(Image credit: no idea, but I found it on blastr. It's probably a photoshop, but in any event, if it's not clear, this is a Firefly reference.)
WINNER: cynric --
Has anybody seen our "Firefly class spaceship" drivers cd?!
Smashing Lists has compiled a list of ten horrible video games. Some of them are poorly designed (Club Drive), some are badly conceived (Irritating Stick), and others are just morally despicable (Custer's Revenge).
From my own personal experience, the worst video game that I ever played was Moebius: The Orb of Celestial Harmony. It's been a very long time since I played it, but I distinctly remember getting really irritated at pointless obstacles and commands that didn't work.
What's the worst video game that you've ever played?
Last week's caption contest was so popular that we've decided to make it a weekly feature. The winner will get a free t-shirt from the NeatoShop!
So look around the NeatoShop and type in your choice of t-shirt with your caption. Submit only one caption per comment, but you can leave as many comments as you like. Please make sure that you provide a t-shirt selection or your caption will not be considered.
Martha: "Today, we're making lembas bread pizza! I've never tried it before, but from what I hear this Elven recipe will leave you begging for more." Gimli: "More like begging for Moria! Hah!" *crickets* Gimli: "You know, because it's the place where I--oh, never mind."
Honestly, I haven't seen a lot of anime. But I really liked Bubblegum Crisis, not only for the storyline, but the ambiance. There aren't many presentations of the cyberpunk genre that seem appealing, but the future MegaTokyo seems like a place that I could live in. Unlike most cyberpunk stories, Bubblegum Crisis' universe seems intriguing and even joyful, rather than dismal and hopeless. Other than the problem of sociopathic, murderous robots on the loose, it seems like a good place. I had a lot of fun playing the role-playing game, back in the day.
If you could live in any anime universe, which would you choose?
Ever played Mage? It was one section of the World of Darkness role-playing system by White Wolf and it was my favorite of the series. I never really did like Vampire much because you had to, by definition, play an evil character. And the Werewolf lycanthropy was kind of inconvenient for normal life, not to speak of the messy internal politics of those critters.
Give me the (comparatively) straight-forward world of the magic users of Mage. Sure, there was always the danger of getting hunted down by agents of the Technocracy, but live a quiet lifestyle, and you can probably stay out of trouble. If I were to actually life inside a role-playing game setting, I'd prefer Mage. How about you?
In which role-playing game setting would you most like to live?
At Kotaku, Joshua Wise has a lengthy post about the morality of video games and the efforts of some designers to create reinforcing moral systems in gaming environment. He then proposes an alternative model:
As Aristotle said, the more a person does the good, the more they like doing the good, and conversely, the more a person does evil, the more they are inclined to continue to do evil. Both reason and experience back up Aristotle' s observation. If a person acts in a pattern of charity, they will become the kind of person who is inclined toward charity. If a person habitually degrades other people, they will find it difficult to think well of someone new they meet. One can make an argument for this easily observed reality from theological, philosophical, psychological, and physical grounds. Given this, perhaps the next evolution of the morality system in games should be one which pushed a player toward a particular choice depending on their tendencies. If the player has thrown someone out of the window the past three times he or she has argued, shouldn't that be what he or she is inclined to do this time?
Implementation could be achieved in game by either limiting the player's time to make a choice, and by weighing the way he or she starts off making the choice, i.e. it's easier to click that part of the screen, or you have to go a farther distance with the cursor to get to the alternate choice. This would allow the user to make choices both in line and out of line with his or her tendency, but it would also show how making choices shapes what is most natural for a person. It would also be a good indication to the player of what kind of road their character is heading down. There may come a day, the game might say through this interface, where you are so far gone that the good choice will be utterly out of reach in the time you have. Or it might say that there is a time ahead when that bad choice is so distant from your own character and morality, that it is well nigh impossible for you to make that choice.
So, basically, a player could direct his player at will, but would have to show some sort of moral consistency (something that we've previously discussed).
Would you like to see such a system -- or any other moral system -- in video games?
