Ken Newquist Things take a horror tinged turned in this week’s podcast with reviews of Midnight Syndicate’s retrospective horror music album Out of Darkness and the horror-movie inspired board game Betrayal at House on the Hill by Avalon Hill. Elsewhere in the podcast as for feedback from geek parents about the merits of getting a notebook computer … Read more
My autumn reading jag, which saw me tear through a half-dozen novels, petered out this winter as I ran into the slow, meandering text of The Difference Engine, a book that promised a steampunk revolution but got bogged down in its own minutiae. I haven’t done much better on the audio front, after a preachy … Read more
Game Day may be cancelled due to snow — freaking Pennsylvania spring weather — but that doesn’t mean we can’t still dream of what might have been. Tonight’s game was/is supposed to be Risk 2210 (check it out on Amazon) the science fiction re-imagining of the classic Risk board game of old. The game retains … Read more
I’m going to be upgrading Nuketown to the latest and greatest version of Drupal at some point over the next two days (hopefully tonight, given that I’ve laid in supplies of Mountain Dew and fried chicken, and the family won’t be home until late). I’m testing it on local version hosted by ye ol’PowerMac first, … Read more
Baby NeutronLad learns to crawl and joins me as a guest host of the latest edition of Radio Active. In addition to news about our littlest geek, I’ve got news about a new “Game Day” column that’s running on Nuketown, a review of Gears of War, and audio feedback from Doug of the Geek Acres podcast. In … Read more
We’ll never get to explore along side John Carter on Mars, but it’s always nice to know that worlds as weird as anything Edgar Rice Burroughs might have imagined do exist … minus the warlords and Martian princesses of course. NASA’s Cassini space probe has found good evidence of large seas on Titan, Saturn’s moon … Read more
Hat-tip to Joystiq for this Reuters story which notices that hey, parents like to game … and they’re likely to get their kids to game as well. They dub these strange creatures “Nintendads” since many grew up on Nintendo systems and are now happily doling out $250 to buy Nintendo Wiis for their kids (and … Read more
I love WizKids’ Pirates of the Spanish Main and its various expansions, even though I never actually get to play the game. Hell, I think I’ve officially played it twice, but that hasn’t stopped me from picking up booster packs for every other expansion.
The most recent of these is Pirates of the Frozen North , which introduces a new Viking faction and corresponding Viking longships. It also has icebergs that move about the board on their own, smashing any ships they come in contact with, and the icebreaking ships needed to destroy them. I picked up a pack to honor my Swedish ancestors, but I’m more interested in snagging the recent Pirates of the Mysterious Island, which has submarines, and the upcoming Pirates at the World’s Edge which ups the game’s weirdness quotient even further with giant crabs and prehistoric sharks.
I always hated busy work in school, and I’m hating it now as I update my home’s various computers for tomorrow’s daylight saving time switch, the one that our ingenious Congress decided to foist upon us. The goal of the change in DST — it now happens about three weeks earlier in the spring, and … Read more
There’s no game day for me today, as I’d had alternative plans that fell through when I came down with Pink Eye. Which isn’t to say there’s not some great gaming news to talk about — after much debate, scrambling and a little bit of arm twisting (or perhaps just enthusiastic encouragement — I wasn’t … Read more