Nuketown

March 2010

The Advantage of Episodic Storytelling in the Star Wars RPG

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Fri, 03/26/2010 - 4:28pm

Rebellion Era Campaign GuideWhen I ran my Dungeons & Dragons/World of Greyhawk campaign, I constantly spawned new subplots, new NPCs, and new locations. It was intentional; my goal was to throw a wide net of possible plotlines, and let the players choose which ones to follow. By campaign's end we probably had hundreds of unresolved storylines, but it wasn't a problem because the important storylines – the defeat of the giants in the Grand Duchy of Geoff, the defeat of the orcish overlord Turrosh Mak, the liberation of Obsidian Bay – did reach their climatic ends.

CNN.com: Nintendo to unveil 3-D gaming console

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Wed, 03/24/2010 - 7:58am

Nintendo has announced the 3DS, a follow-up to the Nintendo DS that will let you play 3D games without the funky glasses. It will also be backwards compatible with the original DS and DSi.

My family is a big fan of the DS. The kids each have one, and I have one of my own (which my wife occasionally borrows to play Scrabble). Like most gamers, I can remember Nintendo's last ill-fated (nay, catastrophically doomed) foray into 3D gaming with the Virtual Boy. I only played it once, but was enough for me to decide 3D wasn't ready for prime time.

Flash forward two decades, and maybe it is. I won't dismiss the 3DS out of hand as a gimmick, because if done well it could help distinguish itself from Apple's iProducts and Sony's PSP line. And let's not forget that plenty of people dismissed the DS touch screen as a gimmick (not me -- I got one the first Christmas it was out) and look what happened.

The key is that it has to work and work seamlessly. If you have to hold it "just so" for it to work, if it gives you headaches when you use it, and if the games are unredeemably gimmicky, then it will fail. But if they nail it, well, it could be very, very cool.

Astro Boy rockets to the Wii

Posted in by hardcorhobbs on Thu, 03/18/2010 - 4:30am

"There you go Astro Boy. On your flight into space. Rocket high, through the sky. What adventures soon you will make." ~Astro Boy theme song

After nearly 50 years what adventures could Astro Boy still make? Astro Boy the Video Game (DS, Wii, PS2, PSP) seeks to discover just that, in a fun little old-school style adventure.

Astro Boy is the story of an advanced robot, named Astro, who is created to replace the deceased son of a brilliant scientist. Unfortunately the scientist discovers his son can never be replaced and rejects Astro. Eventually he is found by another scientist who discovers Astro is more than he seems.

The Ides of Geek Fitness

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Tue, 03/16/2010 - 7:53pm

It's mid-March, which makes it a good time for an update on my March fitness initiative. So far it's going considerably better than February - I've been to the gym almost every week day, and have made a nice dent in my Alias Season 2 and Firefly viewing schedule. On the weight front, I'm at 213 lbs, which is down from 215, but still within my personal margin of error (though it is nice to be back at 213; I had been bouncing the other direction, to 217, on far too regular a basis).

Foodwise I've been drinking less soda, but I had far, far too much pizza last weekend chased down by a goodly amount of Mountain Dew but I haven't been overdoing it on a daily basis, so it all balanced out in the end.

Or at least, that's the theory.

My plan for the or the rest of the much is more of the same: working out at the gym for 30-40 minutes each day, walking to work as much as I can, keeping the soda in check, and avoiding those second helpings at dinner. I don't know if it's enough to get me to my goal of 210 lbs by the end of the month, but its a good routine nonetheless.

Off the Bookshelf: Cole Protocol, Skies of Pern, Century Rain

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Mon, 03/15/2010 - 6:30am

Cover: The Cole ProtocolAfter a fiendishly busy January and February, I've finally had a chance to take a deep breath and spend some time reading. First up on my early spring reading list is The Cole Protocol by Tobias Buckell, a Halo Universe novel involving the quest to prevent the alien Covenant from securing navigation data leading to Earth.

On deck is The Skies of Pern by Anne McCaffrey, one of her last in the classic science fiction setting which features telepathic dragons and their human riders battling the alien, sky-borne menace of Thread, followed by Century Rain, near-future apocalypse/time travel/alternate reality book by Alistair Reynolds.

GameCryer.com: Six-Shooters & Spaceships reviewed

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Sat, 03/13/2010 - 6:37pm

The Six-Shooters & Spaceships sourcebook for the Serenity RPG provides plenty of what a body needs to stay alive in Joss Whedon’s space western universe: weapons, equipment and spaceships. My review of the book is up on GameCryer.com.

It's not an essential book, but it is a useful one as it introduces a variety of low and high tech items (livestock, new guns, cybernetics) as well as a ship floor plans and write-ups. There are also crew bios and statblocks for each ship, which are perfect as NPCs or heroes for a one-shot. While I run Serenity infrequently, I am planning on using the ship floor plans for my Star Wars: Shadows of the Force campaign.

Game Day: Return to the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Fri, 03/05/2010 - 9:13am

After many months away from the game, my group is returning to Dungeons & Dragond 3rd Edition for an old school dungeon crawl through the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth using the D&D 3.5 version released in 2007.

I've got mixed feelings about this.

While I owned the Lost Caverns as a kid and read through it cover to cover several times, I never had a chance to run it. Moreover, with this module we're going to continue what we started with our White Plume Mountain run by travelling back into our D&D campaign's history to the founding of the Blackrazor Guild. In White Plume Mountain, guild leader Brant Bladescream recovered the infamous soul-devouring sword Blackrazor (but lost most of his adventuring companions in the process). In The Lost Caverns, he's taking a new band of heroes into the depths of an infamous dungeon in search of even more powerful magical relics.

Radio Active #83: The Game Room Rebooted

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Wed, 03/03/2010 - 9:10pm

Good news -- Nuketown Radio Active did not see its shadow, and has emerged from its winter hiatus with an episode that looks at my new gaming room, runs down the video games I've been playing, and talks about the comic book companies you should be following on Twitter.

The March Initiative

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Wed, 03/03/2010 - 7:31pm

Spring's in the air, or it would be if only there weren't still a half-foot of snow sitting in my backyard. Baseballs are flying in Florida and somewhere in Easton, Pa. there undoubtedly a few brave daffodil shoots fighting their way to the surface.

The last two months have been hard on my geek fitness efforts; I got of to decent starts in January and February, only to have family colds, home improvement projects, and snow storms sidetrack my plans.

With March upon us, it's time to try and get back into a routine. My immediate goal is to pick up where I left off in February, and continue my morning workouts. These are exceedingly hard for me -- I'm just not a morning person -- but it's the one surefire way I have of making sure my exercise for the day gets done. As I've demonstrated time and again, it's all too easy to let exercise slide when a meeting runs late, I get caught up in a project, or a family emergency breaks out.