Byte Sized Classic Games

I am a lover of all things video game-related. You can expect to see potentially lengthy posts about art, music, gameplay and other aspects.I invite comments and questions about gaming and myself. (All questions will be answered publicly unless it's...

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I have not played Arc Raiders. I probably will not play Arc Raiders. My computer is ancient in gaming terms and doesn't even run the right OS; it's not my genre of game (despite enjoying the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer), and my available time to dive into a game like this is pitifully small.

So, I can't recommend Arc Raiders to anyone. But what I can recommend is the Arc Raiders cover art. This is, as the kids say or at least used to say, sick. Designed by Robert Sammelin, who has done numerous works for comics, video games and movies, this thing just screams 1970s video game sci-fi. The choice of font and its off-white coloring; the pastel neon lines running off to the left; the halftone dot pattern of the two persons in the background (which you can't see on Tumblr but can witness with the original image on his website here); the saturated single-tone color of the characters. The only thing that separates this from being a fine Colecovision or 2600 cover is the CGI character design instead of being hand-painted (which Sammelin is also capable of), but that choice might have put off current gamers from thinking the game itself is "modern" and "pretty" enough.

I will forever lament that we have moved beyond the days of watercolor, airbrush and colored pencil game covers, but you can still have something striking and beautiful.

[san-sebastienne]

Dashiell Hammett, who basically invented the noir genre (think: The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man) hung out enough in the queer scene in San Francisco in the 20s-30s that he picked up some contemporary queer lingo that he folded into his stories. In The Maltese Falcon, there’s a scene where the wildly gay-coded villain shows up at a meeting with a skinny little blonde with a bad attitude and a gun in tow, and detective Sam Spade tells him to “leave the gunsel outside” — gunsel being contemporary gay slang for a young, effeminate man who probably bottoms (from the Yiddish gansl, meaning gosling). Basically, he’s saying “I’m here to talk to you, not your twink.”

However, a lot of writers mimicking Hammett did not know gay lingo or Yiddish, saw the word “gun,” and assumed “gunsel” meant “scary bodyguard with a gun.” They took off with a word they didn’t understand and spread it so fast that it’s now basically impossible to read a noir story written between 1930-1960 without someone accidentally being called a twink at least once. Look out for it next time you’re reading Raymond Chandler or his ilk, I guarantee you’ll find it.

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Side note: not only does the terminology live on incorrectly, but it propagates far beyond noir novels. By the time of 2087 when Wasteland -- a game set in the genre of 80s future retro -- takes place, the concept of a Gunsel has gone in the exact opposite direction. Gunsels are now bears.

Side Note^2: Wasteland was developed and released in 1987, years before Rodney King and the LA riots. It takes place in the Southwest United States near California. The character depicted above is not a glorification of the LAPD.

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WARNING: LONG POST AHEAD

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, my first game art project in some years... Scarabaeus (aka Invaders of the Lost Tomb in the Americas). "Scarawhat?" you might be asking, and you wouldn't necessarily be wrong to do so. Even among classic computer gaming afficionados, this is not a particularly well-known title. But it should be, for Scarabaeus (developed by Andromeda Software and published by AriolaSoft in 1985) was an amazing achievement for its time. Blending creative use of sprites, custom character sets and bitmap graphics, it allowed players to walk and rotate their way around 3D mazes, chase remarkably spooky ghost-like apparitions, and solve tricky puzzles with numerous hieroglyphics, medicines and poisons. It did this across three increasingly large floors of a pyramid, and it did it all within the paltry memory limitations of the Commodore 64.

I have accomplished many gaming feats in my life, but beating Scarabaeus is not one of them. I never stood a chance of beating this game. Our copy was pirated, and without a manual it was impossible to know how the game functioned or what you were supposed to do. I would frequently take poison by accident or zoom to the bottom floor and softlock the game by using up all the puzzle moves on the Pharoah's crypt without having gathered the clues. But I was enthralled by the graphics, music and experience nonetheless. I spent hours haphazardly doing between okay and horrible, never understanding why, and loving it all the same.

As we moved into the internet times and I start doing work on video game art, I longed to create a print for my beloved Scarabaeus. It was, along with other notables like Contra and Wasteland, a white whale, even moreso than the others because it did not have their renown. To this day, 40 years later, virtually no high resolution scans of the game exist online. Those few that do are of the audiocassette version, which was printed in small size and questionable quality. Pixelated low-resolution photographs have been uploaded to fan sites of other renditions of the game. Occasionally, an excellent condition copy of disk versions of the game appears on eBay (usually at a price of $400+) but these listings do not feature scans, nor are the sellers particularly inclined to provide them.

It seemed that Scarabaeus, like SimCity or the NES version of M.U.L.E., was destined to never have properly appreciated and replicated art. But then, one day recently, during a conversation on the C64 subreddit someone pointed me to an eBay listing of an artist catalogue from the mid-80s that had a small picture of the full sized artwork on a single page. I didn't want to pay $140 with shipping, so I used that information to find reference to the art being used in an issue of Heavy Metal; this revealed that like some other games of the time (such as Ballistix), the art for Scarabaeus wasn't made for the game but repurposed from another source, in this case a 1981 illustrated edition of H. Rider Haggard's 1887 novel She.

The full piece of art, seen here as taken from the eBay listing of the art catalogue, is painted in watercolor by the late Michael Embden, who illustrated a number of fantasy novels in the 80s before shifting to personal landscape painting in the 90s. Also noticeable is how much of the picture has been cropped for the game; this is not merely due to the landscape orientation of the image but due to the story of Scarabaeus involving a lone explorer (and his dog) going through tombs, while She involved a group of individuals (seen on the stairs here) going to tombs. Including the entirety of the picture would have been incongruous with the game (not that it was unheard of in those times).

Anyway, digging around with the knowledge of She led me to find someone who, miraculously, had a 3"x5" photograph of the original art used for printing purposes. They were willing to share the image with me on conditions of non-commercial usage and limited exposure to the internet for usage of the same. (Thus, the images above are the largest sizes I am sharing -- they are superior to anything hosted on webpages currently, but inadequate for commercial production.) I had to do some touching up to remove blemishes and color-correct -- this was material photographed four decades ago and forgotten in some back room, after all -- but it was a crucial piece.

From there it was a matter of replicating the rest of the game's box art, which came in two varieties. The left image above, more sedate and appropriate to the trepidation of exploring, was used for cassette tape and flat-paper disk packaging. It features a teal-grey game logo with blue shadowing, teal-grey and blue striped box around the main art with its own grey shadow, a background of white cubes on light grey (common for AriolaSoft games) and the Ariolasoft logo. The right image, used in plastic clamshell packaging for disks, is set up more like one would expect of an action game with an 80s feel: pink logo with pink shadowing, black background sharply contrasting against the yellow art border and the AriolaSoft logo topped by a rainbow bar.

All aspects of the images were created manually except for the game art itself. The game's font is Sinaloa, which I found with the help of Reddit (none of half a dozen font identification systems online could get the answer right); the font for AriolaSoft is Compacta MT Cyrillic, or at least's close enough for government work. All colors for the logos, borders and backgrounds are approximations based on limited pictures available online. Note that the two images contain different colorations of the main art; this is because, whether by design or virtue of different production standards, the cassette/flat disk packaging bore blue-tinted art while the clamshell packaging had a yellow/green tint to it.

Anyway, if you've read this far, thanks for coming on this journey with me. If you or someone you know operates a Scarabaeus fansite or repository then, wow, that is awesome, but also you are invited to use either or both of the images above as part of that site. No commercial reproduction is permitted. Thank you, and have a great day.

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I still play video games, although my time for doing so has been greatly diminished over the past few years, what with going to college to get some degrees, trying to keep up with a running regimen, and now having a full-time job. Time and energy have mellowed my tastes from lengthy RPGs like Valkyrie Profile and Wasteland, and stressful button-mashers like Blaster Master and Street Fighter 2010, to relaxing strategy games.

One of those I've been playing recently is MicroCivilization, by Ondrej Homola. This is a combination incremental numbers/clicking game set amid the backdrop of a developing civilization. And while you wouldn't be wrong to immediately think of something like Cookie Clicker (which I also return to an ongoing 11.4-year run of) or one of the many, many cheap knock-off entries in the genre, I find this one has a little more meat on the bones, as well as a great charming art style. I have followed the game since its early beta demo release days on Steam, and the gameplay has gone through (and still does) significant changes as development continues.

Essentially, you guide a fledgling people (shadowy and faceless) through the process of transitioning from a small primitive band to a burgeoning, advanced society. At the beginning they are are small, and weak, and lack even basic huts to live in:

Much like in the obvious inspiration for the game, Microsoft's Civilization (made all the more obvious by the original logo for the game mimicking the Civ font), you research advancements to your society, starting with fire and progressing to modern technologies and beyond.

Most of the game allows you to play a safe and peaceful progression if that's what you want. You can also choose to grow your people rapidly -- too rapidly -- and face the threats of social uprising, disease, rampant fires, and more. Some research advancements force you to at least risk these things occurring. And even if you've had a perfect and uneventful run for your people otherwise, the transition from one era to the next always has a crisis that you must overcome with military force (currently the only way of resolving any threat, even something like smallpox).

But it's mostly just a nice, laid-back experience of building your society of Little Computer Persons. The pacing of the game is good, adding new options and complexities at regular but not overwhelming intervals until you've had the opportunity to master them all and ultimately pit yourself against some of the game's advanced challenges, like the Tower of Babel scenario, wherein the religious leaders of your people press you to go forward with the sacrilegious structure and suffer the consequences:

If you've ever wanted to get the feel of Civilization without the constant threat of everyone coming after you, or if you just want to see what a society led by Leonidas, Cleopatra, Moses and Adam Smith (all heroes you can collect) would look like, check this out on Steam.

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A Reminder About the Moral Imperative of Pirating Games

Today -- or rather, two days from now in an extraordinary feat of time travel -- the United States Copyright Office ruled (among other things) to uphold the ban against the digital lending of antiquated and abandoned video games by digital library structures; e.g., archive.org or other sites in association with the Video Game History Foundation. This was, no surprise, at the urging of lobbyists from the ESA and other groups who are not in favor of the digital sharing of their works with anyone who has not paid appropriate purchase or licensing fees. The fact that the vast majority of video games ever produced are no longer available for initial purchase from an authorized publisher is not a mitigating consideration.

The sad reality is that regardless of what individual programmers, composers, graphic artists, voice actors or other contributors to a game may feel, most publishers of those games do not view the games as artistic achievements to be shared for posterity so much as competition against their latest offerings. Part of that perception might lie with gamers themselves, who depreciate games rapidly based upon their age, a devaluation that is greatly accelerated over other entertainment media such as movies, television, music and books. It often isn't economically feasible for publishers with the rights to games (for those games whose chain of custody can even be tracked anymore) to port the game to a modern system, as the target audience would be small and what those players will pay is a pittance. Despite its considerable technical achievements and overall coolness, personal favorite Scarabaeus simply isn't going to sell to enough persons to make up the cost of business efforts.

But the alternative shouldn't be to let unused properties rot, either. I have advocated emulation of older games before; indeed, I spent four and a half years doing exactly that to make about 1700 posts about classic arcade, computer and console video games. Generally, I advocate this because as gamers we deserve the breadth of experiences available to us and the only way to achieve that can be the legally dubious route. Now, however, it is clear that without the intervention of gamers as a population, the appreciation of old games will be lost -- as some publishers would like them to be, and that would be a shame.

Though I can't directly link to any site that provides ROMs or disk or tape images of older systems, such things can be very easy to find on Google. The difficulty of emulation varies with the system; many older cartridge-based consoles such as the Atari 2600, NES, SNES and Sega Genesis, are amazingly easy. MAME for arcade games may take a little adjustment for its interface depending on which version you go with. All of these are based on long-since obsolete chip-based ROM storage which was incredibly small. Games of the Fifth Generation of video game consoles (PS1, Sega Saturn, et al) have CDs or larger storage mediums which take a little longer to download and more storage space on your drive. The Commodore 64, Amiga, Apple II and other computer systems have tens of thousands of games -- some of astounding quality -- but most require you to operate the system within the emulator, so that may be a bridge too far. Whatever road you decide to take, good luck and enjoy.

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To commemorate the successful end of a very difficult first half of summer classes, I took some birthday money and bought a new board game for the first time in several years. This one is about character creation, and as someone who could spend half an hour or more just rolling a beginning party's stats for games like Bard's Tale, Wasteland, or Might and Magic, this really speaks to me.

The base game is just about creating characters; I will probably eventually pick up the first expansion that not only provides more options for characters but also adds the ability to fight monsters with those characters, but both at the same time is a little too pricey.

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Warm on the heels of my post two days ago about GameFAQs stripping out actual FAQs, I am thrilled to share this trailer that I was just made aware of this morning via Reddit.

Flash, as some of you may know, is a now defunct, literally obliterated web format that was popular throughout the 2000s and 2010s. It allowed thousands, possibly millions, of people to create animations as well as numerous web-based games. The format was not without its share of problems (especially in terms of security), and the quality of the items produced varied wildly but that didn't stop a large variety of people, including me, from being upset when Adobe discontinued it entirely and Flash seemed consigned to oblivion.

The Flashpoint Archive is a massive collection of games and animations which were made possible in Flash, available on a single website, for free. If you played a Flash game in the past, chances are it's here. That doesn't mean you can find it, necessarily, unless you remember the name; for instance, before the turn of the millennium I remember playing a game where you bounced a ball or bike down a hill and then tried to launch it as far as you could before it landed. I have no idea what it was called, so good luck to me. Nevertheless, this is an awesome step in games preservation for collective creative efforts that many would have been fine with abandoning to rot.

[resident-dorkazoid]

Quick Important PSA

Fandom has been taking down those extremely intricate and helpful GameFAQs text guides because they're a terrible company run by rat bastards, so if you care about archiving those old guides for a smoother experience on the earliest generation of games, i've linked prograc's archive of just about every single one you can think of. make sure to download the whole 7z file (its ~2GB), as this is undoubtedly the most accurate and useful tool for anybody wanting to experience video game history.

Gamespot TXT GameFAQs - Full Archive (3/23/20) : /u/prograc : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

More info here:https://web.archive.org/web/20200707075947/https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ftsdbs/gamespot_txt_gamefaqs_full_ar

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Before I forget any further, I wanted to share this with the general public because it is, in my opinion, noteworthy.

Though GameFAQs has not been what it once was for quite some time, it was once the place to get questions about your games answered. There are numerous titles, including Valkyrie Profile, which I would never have "properly" completed without them. The totality of the guides and information stored there is an incredible testament to the collaboration of game-players the world over, which has been in progress since the days of AOL; there are walkthroughs on there from over three decades ago, longer than many Tumblr users have been alive. I have even written FAQs for games on there. (Hell, I'm still credited somewhere in there for finding the hidden unused ending for Symphony of the Night.)

And all of this was done for free, out of enthusiasm for the hobby and in the exact opposite spirit of gatekeeping for which gamers have come to be known. These aren't monetized -- at least not by their creators -- and capture a lengthy period of time long before the uniquitous wikis became a thing.

If you have now (or think you will in the future) an interest in retro gaming or just curiosity about what the collective population of the hobby managed to achieve before the internet became about just money, I highly recommend the archive above which, at a mere 2GB, is a pittance of space. And once again I am grateful for archive.org.

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Every once in a while, I still poke my head in here to inform the public about what I feel to be worthwhile gaming news or experiences, especially those from indie developers who could use the exposure. Today's recommendation is Backpack Hero, a turn-based roguelike (as in, repeatable randomly generated playthrough) inventory management game. It turned out to be exactly what I was looking for after a hard semester. If, like me, you like the idea of synergistic item play in other more frenetic games like Binding of Isaac but you like a more methodical, think-it-out approach instead of relying upon your reflexes (and a 360 controller with advanced drift problems) then this might be right up your alley. Five different characters, each with a truly different playstyle, a story mode where you rebuild a town and take on various challenges (or straight up quickplay to hop into things) and a mind-boggling 800 or so items to discover along the way. With each level you'll increase the size of your backpack in ways that you choose and after each fight and special room, you'll choose what items to stock it with, where, and in which directions.

It's probably the best $20 I've dropped on a game in a long time. And I say that after spending more than 70 hours playing and seeing the very worst and most unfair of what it has to offer:

It's available on Steam and GOG, although there appears to be some question about whether or not the GOG version is up-to-date with Steam, and Steam offers the Workshop with many user-made enhancements. On the other hand, if you're in a similar boat as myself, you might have other reasons to consider GOG:

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PAX Swag on eBay

What do you get for that gamer in your life that has everything? Or for yourself when you have considerably less? Well, I have at least a possible suggestion. Have you considered a box of PAX (Penny Arcade Expo) swag?

As of a few minutes ago, I now have four auctions up, one for each year in which my wife and I attended (2009 - 2012). What you get is essentially at least one of everything that we picked up at the con, from lanyards, badges and hotel room keys to stickers, cards and, in each year, much more impressive items. Patches, metal cars, resin statuettes, tie bars, magnet sets, The One Ring and much more can be yours for a quite reasonable price. Take a time machine back to the height of the Seventh Generation of video gaming and relive those glory days -- or just add a little more completeness to your memorabilia collection.

If this sounds intriguing -- and let's be honest, of course it does -- why not hop on over to eBay and find out what's up? All the goods are authentic and have been well cared for, and you know I mean it when I say it. Plus, you get that warm feeling in helping me to acquire money to do things like <checks notes> go to school and better myself! Here are the links to each of the listings:

PAX 2009 swag box

PAX 2010 swag box

PAX 2011 swag box

PAX 2012 swag box

And, if you're not so much into video game merch but you read this far anyway, have you considered fabricating a career in banking? Who hasn't? I've got your back. I'm also auctioning off 15 years worth of pins and years-of-service cubes from my time at Wells Fargo. Everything you need to feel like you spent a decade and a half moldering away in a cubicle, except for the wrinkles and gray hair. Check it out!

Wells Fargo Employee Memorabilia collection

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Unity pricing change.

Unity Technologies, maker of the game development engine Unity, announced today that they will be changing the pricing structure for the engine in the near future. Among the other changes involved, developers using the Unity engine will be charged for their use of the engine on a per-install basis, with uninstalls and reinstalls from the same user counting as multiple installs.

If I had the time I could spend an hour telling you why this is, economically, a ridiculous decision given the nature of game distribution. However, suffice to say this means that game demos, bundles, free copies, and games on subscription services are all dangerous to developers using Unity, as they could result in installations that cause them financial harm while potentially not bringing in enough (or any) money to compensate for that.

You can't really do anything about those as players, but another impact you'll want to consider is that DRM free games are also dangerous to developers; any game which can be passed around for free and installed on multiple systems could be a financial drain. This means there is the potential for games on GOG (which features no DRM) to be removed from the system, or patched. I am, as always, a large proponent of DRM-free games since circa 1987, so I feel this is relevant information to pass along here.

The list of Unity games on GOG is potentially large. A lack of interface-able data prevents me from putting together anything comprehensive, but I know it includes titles like Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The Legend of Heroes, Layers of Fear, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, Children of Morta, Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun and other popular titles. If you have some favorite games on GOG and are concerned about any impacts, I recommend checking to see if they run under Unity and downloading an executable now as a DRM-free backup in case any complications occur in the future.

[thehubby]

Introducing Dextra

Like many gamers, it has long been a goal of mine to develop and publish my own game, to add a minute something to the fabric of our culture, but especially to the hobby which I have enjoyed for a very long time. At long last, through a confluence of self-determination, assistance from friends, and an environment more friendly to independent publishing than any yet, the time for that dream is now. It gives me great pleasure to introduce you to the my first role-playing game, Dextra.

What is Dextra? It is a very rules-light narrative-focused tabletop RPG. It is designed for players who are most interested in a game system that helps them structure telling stories, not crunching numbers and trying to figure out optimal builds. In fact, telling a good story is the only objective and "win" condition in Dextra. Even if the land is ravished, the villain escapes and the heroes perish, if the table tells a satisfying tale, the table wins.

How does Dextra play? Dextra is designed for casual players (even if they do take their stories very seriously!), and is intended to address one of the biggest problems I personally have had with tabletop gaming over the years: rules bloat and accessibility. There is only one hard rule in Dextra: every facet of the game (including contributions of the players) must be subservient to the story at hand. Between the 15 pages of basic guidelines and 65 pages of support materials, there are many recommendations of how to proceed, but you are free and encouraged to ignore any and all of them as befits your need to tell the story.

There are no lists of classes, powers, equipment and such in Dextra, no codified character abilities, spells, races or anything else. It is a game truly limited only by the imagination of the players at the table. But you need not worry about your fellow players abusing this potential to create overpowered monstrosities, because they don't make their own characters. Each player provides a name and class -- any class, from fighter to fae emissary, wizard to werewolf hunter -- and character sheets are passed around the table where everyone else gives them the attributes, powers and abilities, equipment and items, and traits and quirks that make them who they are. It's a little like Mad Libs, except instead of dubiously entertaining jibberish, you're likely to end up with something cool like an Infernal Bloodline, a Ruggedness ability score, or Spear of Lightning.

Taking actions and overcoming challenges is done using 2d6 (two six-sided dice for any newcomers out there), adding the character elements that the player feels are appropriate to their roll, and comparing it to a predetermined difficulty that the Game Master establishes for the action. GMs don't need to look up any tables; they simply estimate the difficulty of an action (assuming it is one that carries a risk of failure at all) from 1 to 10, and add 5. There are guidelines for combat, hit points, character conditions and so on if desired, but Dextra does not contain realistic or complicated battle mechanics. If that's your jam, this may not be for you.

Is Dextra free? No, it is not free. It has taken nearly a year to conceive, write, edit, format and ultimately publish the game, and I believe in fair compensation for myself just as for any other writer or creator. The price of the Dextra Core Rulebook (the only book currently, and all that you need to play) is what I think to be a reasonable figure of $5. That being said, I also wrote this game so it could be played. I know times are hard for a lot of people right now. Sometimes even five bucks is something you just don't have for the luxury of playing games. If you want to play this with your table and you just can't swing the price, send an Ask to the Dextra-RPG Tumblr account and I will get you set up with a complimentary copy, no questions asked, no judgements. I will also be adding an appropriate amount of free community copies on Itch.io any time someone with the spare means chooses to overpay on their purchase by $5 or more.

Where can I get it? Dextra is currently offered at Itch.io (link provided). It should be published on DriveThruRPG (link provided) sometime within the next three days after their review and approval. It is currently only available as a digital PDF download (preparing print-on-demand copies involves some software and expertise I do not currently possess). If you wish to obtain a copy of the game and have a preference between these two sites, by all means go with that. If you have no preference, then my recommendation is Itch.io, as they not only take a smaller cut of the sale, but have more features available (such as complimentary community copies and easier means to send free codes to users).

Where can I get more information? If you have questions about the game, send me an Ask on the Dextra-RPG Tumblr account. You can also check or follow that account for occasional posts of information and to find out how you can contribute to a crowd-sourced character creation project to be offered as a free download to potential players.

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This blog has historically been dedicated to classic video gaming, but I know that there is some Venn diagram overlap between that group and tabletop gamers, so this may be of interest to you all (maybe not the porn bots) as well!

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For a while now I've been auctioning off my video games, soundtracks, even an anime shirt or three. I'll be moving soon to include practically anything else in our basement, and that includes our PAX swag.

We attended PAX [Prime] for four years (2009-2012) before ultimately deciding that, for a variety of reasons, the experience was no longer working for us. However, during each of those years, we scoured the convention floor, played games and collected all manner of free (at least monetarily free) stuff. At the end of each PAX, our booty would be carefully boxed for storage. [Pictured above: the PAX 2010 collection]

Now the results can be yours. If you're into unusual and rare video game memorabilia, or just the time capsule of where popular domestic gaming was, this is for you. And there are indeed some interesting items. Fake moustache from Bionic Commando: Rearmed? Yup. One Ring on a Chain from Lord of the Rings Online? Check. Lenticular art card for Katamari Forever? Sure. There are also some ultra-rare items, such as the die-cast metal GM-authorized toy cars from the XBox Live Arcade game Scrap Metal, and the complete set of three Firefall miniature figures (but you will not get my shot glass!)

All of this should be coming to my eBay listings sometime over the next week or so. For those interested, good luck and happy bidding!

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Unnamed tropical drink I got at my wife's office holiday party! Coconut rum, triple sec, grenadine, pineapple juice, apple juice. It's like the bartender pushed the random button in her cocktail generator.

EDIT: Whoops, posted to the wrong account. Sorry!

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SuperGiant Games has announced Hades II, and I couldn't be more excited. The first game was my choice for game of the decade, and I sunk more hours into mastering it than pretty much any game in the modern era. The new game, while a full-fledged sequel, looks like an extension of the quality and stylings of the first game, which is good news.

Many questions remain about the main character, Melinoë (did they have to use the umlaut?), who is officially said to be Zagreus's sister. In theory, that means she is a daughter of Hades, and there is a family resemblance for sure. The Greek gods, especially the prime three, were known to be a fecund lot, so a dalliance by Hades is not exactly bizarre, but information about her mother (Nyx? Hecate? Circe?) and upbringing is something we'll have to play to discover. We know she is trained in witchcraft as well as combat, so there will definitely be a lot of new gameplay elements to explore.

It's set for Early Access in 2023, probably a full release in 2024, which is good, since I have neither the time nor a proper computer (nor even proper controller, with my XBox 360 suffering major drift issues now) to enjoy it, but two years to get there.

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With the advent of December and the heart of winter, the holiday season is upon us. You may celebrate Christmas, Channukah, Kwanzaa, Yule, or even just a non-day-specific appreciation of surviving another year. Regardless of the occurrence, if you're a DM or GM deserving of a little extra appreciation, may I suggest you gift yourself the venerable Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (1st Edition) Dungeon Masters Guide.

This is, quite simply, my favorite RPG rulebook of all time, and if you have it in your collection, you probably know why. It's not for the rules -- those are antiquated, clunky, and absolutely brutal (as demonstrated by the sample of gameplay where one of the characters, in the party's first enemy encounter, is instantly devoured in a surprise attack by ghouls following one bad die roll).

What makes this book great, in my opinion, and deserving of a spot in every GM's collection, regardless of what system they actually run, is how it speaks to the experience of being a GM, not just in rules, but philosophy. Every section discussing various rule sets (and there are a ton of them) explains not only the numbers and processes but the rationale behind them. These explanations make much of the book surprisingly rules-agnostic and malleable for GMs skilled in their own games.

This is clearly a work of passion and, regardless of what anyone may think of Gygax and Arneson as game designers, their early work such as this is overflowing with creativity and style. While it is true that an editor could have been used to trim some extra fat here and there, this is perhaps the single most diverse gaming book I've ever possessed, with everything from the magical properties of gems and flowers, detailed (yet non-codified) discussion of physical and mental illnesses, and a lengthy explanations of medieval occupations which adventurers may hire. There are rules for creating magical items, a dice-rolling list for mixing potions together, extensive tables for the powers of mighty magic items, and an incredibly cool list of the ways to destroy artifacts (to this day, discussion remains about just what a "humble ant" is and how its foot could crush an ancient relic.) It is 230 pages of tiny-fonted information.

(It also, after 45 years, still provides the single best explanation of the concept of hit points in a role-playing game that I have ever seen, and one I refer back to when trying to get players to understand why their warrior might sustain 10 attacks with a longsword while the commoner on the street dies after one stab of the dagger.)

Despite its age, copies can still be found for $25-35 in many places, although prices are slowly starting to creep up after all these years. If you can't afford this (and believe me, I understand), scans of the book are also available online in a number of places. Though it's not the same tactile experience as flipping through the book, you can still absorb this old, sometimes off the wall wisdom. Treat yourself, you deserve it.

[gamwthnzwhmou]

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