One of the first computer games I remember playing was Adventure!, a text-based RPG that was based on Colossal Cave, a piece of interactive fiction developed at MIT in the early 1970s. It shared its DNA with what would become one of the most popular IF franchise: Zork. I played Zork I, but not its … Read more
Blue Dragon Plus is a role-playing game/real-time strategy game mash-up and portable sequel to the Xbox 360 original JRPG. The first Blue Dragon was a game that I’d hoped to check out when it was released in Winter 2007 — I was in a bit of an RPG drought at the time, and it looked … Read more
Wilderness of Mirrors by John Wick 17 pages MSRP: $5.00 Buy it from Indie Press Revolution A few years ago I ran a short-lived Spycraft 1.0 PBEM campaign. It barely made it out of the briefing stage, ultimately succumbing to the asynchronous maladies that doom most play-by-email games. The campaign lived on in the back … Read more
The Xbox Live version of Ticket to Ride is a faithful port of the popular board game, recreating the train-themed game on Microsoft’s game console. The game board features a map of the continental United States with its major cities connected by different colored train routes. Players draw different colored tickets from a deck each … Read more
War. War never changes. But thankfully, it does gets upgrades. Fallout 3’s all about those upgrades, presenting the best damn post-apocalyptic America this side of Thunderdome. Just as in the first Fallout from the late 90s, you stumble out of a subterranean Vault and blink at the toxic wasteland. Only now it’s rendered in millions … Read more
I don’t know if it’s an awareness thing because my group started playing Star Wars, but there seem to be a lot of science fiction games being released over the last year or so, and particularly the last few months. Case in point: over the last two weeks there have been reviews of Slipstream, Imperium … Read more
Blink is a rapid-fire card game in which two players attempt to match shape-filled game cards as quickly as possible based on design, number or color. It’s also become our stocking stuffer/birthday present of choice in the Newquist household. In the standard game, each player’s given their own deck with the same number of cards. … Read more
Some of the second-stage books for D&D 4th Edition are hitting book stores, which has ignited a new wave of reviews among bloggers. I don’t think any of these new books are going to change hearts and minds among those who dislike 4E — that will have to wait for 2009’s Player’s Handbook II — … 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
I slacked on my own game review duties at Nuketown this week (though I did pitch a review to a new market) but thankfully others remained on the ball, yielding a number of new reviews.
There are two more Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition reviews out this week. The Geek Gazette offers some initial thoughts on the Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide and rants about the necessity of buying both a campaign guide and a player’s guide. This is undoubtedly great for WotC’s bottom line, he argues, but no so great for players.
My understanding is that Wizards is scaling back its campaign offerings, so these may be the only two FR books you get this year. I have to think they’ll publish additional Forgotten Realms source books in 2009, but at the same time they’ve been pretty upfront about releasing books for one campaign setting a year (FR this year, Eberron next, maybe Dark Sun after that).
I think the bigger question could end up being not “is this too much?” but “is it enough?”
RPG.net has a favorable review of Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. Reviewer Eric Christian Berg liked the ease of building encounters and the dynamic nature of combat.