Ken Newquist After a long, hard-fought autumn spent coding, organizing projects and reviewing way, way too many video games, I’ve got the urge to read. It’s a compulsion really, a strong desire to find a quiet corner of the house (or even a noisy, chaotic corner of the house) and lose myself in a good paperback.
Snow plays havoc with Game Days. We plan out everything — whose house we’ll be at, what game we’re playing, who’s able to make it and then whammo, a Nor’Easter comes roaring in and dumps a half foot of snow over our plans. In the old days, that would have meant the end of game … Read more
The Geek Tree is back. There are no major upgrades this year; same white lights, same Buck Rogers-style lights, same Santa Yoda tree topper, same blue rockets-and-planets tree skirt. There’s a new ornament — Hallmark’s 2007 three-warp-nacelled, alternative-future Enterprise-D — but that’s about it. Not that I didn’t try. I found some cool pulsing LED … Read more
It’s my birthday today, and I’ve been having fun playing with my toys, foremost of which is the Classic Battletech Introductory Box Set that my sister Kristen and her husband got me. The box set has led to something of a resurgence of the game in my group. We’ve played Battletech on and off for … Read more
After five sessions of fighting pirates and swoop bike gangers, the heroes of my Knights of the Old Republic campaign went up against their first Sith: Kaldros Ygin, an arrogant self-assured student of the Dark Lady Aldera. I’ve been dropping hints over the last few weeks that Ral Duris, leader of the pirates of Zebulon … Read more
Halo fans have a new novel through which to explore the video game’s continuum. Halo: The Cole Protocol by Tobias Buckell. The new book chronicles humanity’s desperate quest to erase any and all navigational data that could lead the fundamentalist (and xenocidal) Covenant to Earth. The action takes place in an immense asteroid field near … Read more
On this episode of Nuketown Radio Active, I dream of a good night’s sleep, remember the adventure that is potty training my son, recount my Xbox 360 “Red Ring of Death” woes and talk about the boatload of games I’ve been reviewing. In Netheads, I try out the “Is Gd” url shortner, test drive the … Read more
I’ve been experimenting with analytics on Nuketown for the last few months, setting Google Analytics to watch the site’s web traffic and Feedburner to keep an eye on the RSS feeds. Over all, things are going about as well as they usually do, with no huge spikes up or down. The top referrers — the … Read more
I recently did a full restore of my my Mac from Time Machine, Apple’s built-in backup utility for OS 10.5 (Leopard). I had to undertake this radical step because Boot Camp refused to create a Windows partition, complaining about “unmovable files” that could only be eradicated by reformatting the drive and reinstalling Leopard. Overall, I … Read more
One of the challenges of running a Star Wars campaign is finding a way to incorporate plenty of Jedi and their Sith nemeses without tearing asunder the canonical Star Wars timeline. The Expanded Universe has helped with this, providing a number of Dark Apprentices to serve as fodder for Jedi who some how escaped Palpatine’s … Read more