My current lunchtime game is Scales of Truth, a hexcrawl set in a post-apocalyptic science-fantasy setting. Think of a mashup of Thundarr the Barbarian, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, and Mad Max: Fury Road, powered by Dungeons & Dragons. So what’s a hexcrawl? It’s a style of RPG campaign in which the game master populates … Read more
Welcome to the Ready Player One Video Game Replay! Ernst Cline’s dystopian novel Ready Player One (Amazon) is set in a cyberpunk-ish future in which climate change, economic upheaval, pandemics, and other catastrophes have transformed our world. Poverty is rampant, with many people living on the fringes of big cities in the hopes of scraping … Read more
This year, in addition to enough new geeky ornaments to push the tree over its carrying capacity, the Geek Tree’s skirt gathered several new pen-and-paper role-playing games as well as their video game kin. On the video game front, I got Spider-man: Miles Morales for PlayStation 4 (Sony | |Amazon). The game builds on the … Read more
The Ready Player One Replay is an exploration of the games that inspired the novel Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Quote Aech and I had wasted countless hours on two-player classics like Contra, Golden Axe, Heavy Barrel, Smash TV, and Ikari Warriors. Game Play Smash TV is a frantic run-and-gun game inspired by the likes of Running Man … Read more
The Ready Player One Replay is an exploration of the games that inspired the novel Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Quote Aech and I had wasted countless hours on two-player classics like Contra, Golden Axe, Heavy Barrel, Smash TV, and Ikari Warriors. Game Play Heavy Barrel is a top-down shooter in which one- or two-players blast their way through … Read more
Golden Axe is a side-scrolling, fantasy-based hack’n’slash video game that dominated arcades in the early 1990s. Released in 1989 by Sega, the game was one that my friends and I would happily pump quarters into until we completed its epic quest, usually laughing our asses off whenever we did something particularly dumb on screen. It … Read more
The Ready Player One Replay is an exploration of the games that inspired the novel Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Quote Aech and I had wasted countless hours on two-player classics like Contra, Golden Axe, Heavy Barrel, Smash TV, and Ikari Warriors. Game Play Contra is a side-scrolling two-player shooter by Konami featuring two muscle-bound … Read more
The Ready Player One Replay is an exploration of the games that inspired the novel Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Quote … hundreds of polyhedral dice like those used in old tabletop role-playing games. — Ready Player One p. 10 A freeze-frame of this scene appears nearly identical to a painting by Jeff Easley that appeared on … Read more
The Ready Player One Replay is an exploration of the games that inspired the novel Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Quote I booted up my emulator and selected Robotron: 2084, one of my all-time favorite games. I’d always loved its frenetic pace and brutal simplicity. Robotron was all about instinct and reflexes. Playing old videogames never … Read more
Asteroids is a 2D, vector-display-based arcade game developed by Lyle Rains and Ed Logg and released by Atari in November 1979. The gameplay revolves around a single spacecraft trapped in an asteroid field that attempts to survive for as long as possible by destroying any space rocks that get close. The Atari 2600 version came … Read more