My Grand Self-Delusion

Deep in the heart of man lies the impulse for self-delusion.. we all like to think we are intelligent animals but there's a part of us that wants the magic to happen. So itis with me when Mary (administrative person for our office) wanders by my cubbie once a week to tell me about the riches to be had by playing the power ball this week. I tell myself, "this is a tax on the poor, dumbass." I tell myself.. "You have as much chance of winning this thing as you do of walking on the moon".. and yet, there I go again.. forking over a dollar every now and then. Mary tells me... "won't it be great when we all win and submit our resignations!"


Yeah, right.

But.. isn't there a glimmer there, where for.. just a second... I have a micro-second 's worth of fantasy, where a few million dollars might come in handy.... and maybe pigs will fly, too. Isn't a micro-second worth a buck every now and then?

Warblob

We just got back from scout camp. Very much the Iron John kind of weekend.. running around, campfires, S'mores, kites, frisbees, hotdogs, scout cooking. Banging on a drum, bad jokes and Indian lore.

Paranthetical Insert:

Mister Nizz's Favorite Campfire Jokes for little children?

A vulture boards an airplane, carrying two dead raccoons. The stewardess looks at him and says,

"I'm sorry, sir, only one carrion allowed per passenger."

Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, so they lit a fire in the craft. Unsurprisingly it sank, proving once again that; you can't have your kayak and heat it too.

Two hydrogen atoms meet. One says "I've lost my electron." The other says "Are you sure?" The first replies

"Yes, I'm QUITE positive."

Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root canal? His goal:

to transcend dental medication.

A group of chess enthusiasts checked into a hotel and were standing in the lobby discussing their recent tournament victories. After about an hour, the manager came out of the office and asked them to disperse.

"But why?" they asked, as they moved off. "Because", he said, "I can't stand chess-nuts boasting in an open foyer."

A woman has twins and gives them up for adoption. One of them goes to a family in Egypt and is named "Ahmal." The other goes to a family in Spain; they name him "Juan." Years later, Juan sends a picture of himself to his birth mother. Upon receiving the picture, she tells her husband that she wishes she also had a picture of Ahmal. Her husband responds,

"Ah, the twins! If you've seen Juan, you've seen Ahmal."

These friars were behind on their belfry payments, so they opened up a small florist shop to raise funds. Since everyone liked to buy flowers from the men of God, a rival florist across town thought the competition was unfair. He asked the good fathers to close down, but they would not. He went back and begged the friars to close. They ignored him. So, the rival florist hired Hugh MacTaggart, the roughest and most vicious thug in town to "persuade" them to close. Hugh beat up the friars and trashed their store, saying he'd be back if they didn't close up shop.

Terrified, they did so, thereby proving that only Hugh can prevent florist friars.

Mahatma Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail and with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath. This made him:

A super calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.

Watching Gar run with the pack, as it were, I noticed a strange, familiar rythmn of the games they were playing. The boys didn't have any gun toys, but they were moving forward in short rushes, covering each other, using sticks as gun stand ins. They were using those little hi-tech walkie-talkies to provide intersquad communications as they moved on objective. This is interesting. None of the adults taught them how, or initiated the game... yet here we were, playing the same games I did when I was a kid (right down to the walkie talkies!).

I don't believe in gun toys-- other than squirt guns. I don't like the revoltingly violent video games that are common faire these days-- our home video system dates back to 1991 and is quite prosaic by modern standards. On the other hand, I've not lived a life devoid of violence and I'm not hypocritical about it. I just don't believe in making it easy for children to ape their elders' mistakes.

The "army man" game was something different altogether.. kind of a tribal memory that boys seem to share. I know Gar didn't get it from me, yet he's quite proficient as an assistant squad leader. I have to wonder if this is the kernel of 'guyhood' that lurks in all of us. Certainly this isn't a new observation... sociologists have observed traditional sexual sterotypes forming in groups of boys, even in a vacumn where no outside catalysts for that behavior are present.

When I talked to Gar later, I asked what game he was playing earlier. He couldn't really give it a name, just "running around"... he said, mumbling. I was greatly amused to see the cycle start itself again..

Just a few items of note, crunched into a post.

Jim Van Verth, the co-creator of the free REALPOLITIK Diplomacy adjudicator is already a minor hero in my book because he pours so much time into making a damned useful tool (realpolitik) for free. I had some problems with RP during my last DIPLOMACY game run on here (SINGULARITY ONE) and had to switch to JDIP to save the game, but I still like the general look and functionality of RP better than JDIP.

So Jim really didn't have to lift his pinkie to add to his exalted status of selfless people that I admire from a distance (not that that will get you even a cup of coffee!).

Vintage Gamer podcast

Now it turns out that Jim is running one of my favorite gaming podcasts going right now. VINTAGE GAMER is not known for its frequency of publication or the dynamic audio presence of Jim (who speaks in a rather quiet and "monotonal" speaking voice). VG is, however, one of the few game podcasts out there that feeds my nostalgia impulse. Very few of the games that Jim covers in his shows were published after the mid-90s. Therefore, they land squarely in the middle of my gaming 'youth' and have receded into a dim misty memory of pleasant past experience. See my Microgame Index if you want an explanation of that impulse. Recent shows on DEMONLORD, CAN'T STOP and especially DIPLOMACY were excellent. I recommend this show for all of you folks who "remember when".

Bringing back Barbarian Prince?

The latest 'cast is on one of my favorite Dwarfstar games of all time, BARBARIAN PRINCE. As Jim is wont to do, he goes through the basic mechanics of BP, in depth. It's a very good episode. A while back, maybe almost two years ago, I published a session of my last solo BP adventure and it eventually found its way up to the Boardgamegeek, HERE and HERE. I'm tempted to post another solitaire adventure on here at some point, that's a fun exercise.

Skullcrusher Mountain

Also on a tip from Jim, I found Jonathan Coulton’s site and downloaded "Skullcrusher Mountain" last night. This is a hysterically funny 'love' song as sang from an evil villain from a James Bond picture's point of view. My favorite lyrics:

I made this half-pony half-monkey monster to please you
But I get the feeling that you don’t like it
What’s with all the screaming?
You like monkeys, you like ponies
Maybe you don’t like monsters so much
Maybe I used too many monkeys
Isn’t it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?

I laughed so hard, I gladly sent the guy a buck.

Costikyan in the latest ESCAPIST

I got my normal email blurb from THE ESCAPIST that they have a new issue out. I've mentioned them on here before, which apparently hacked off the author enough to write in. Well, I'm not taking cudgels to this issue, and actually am strongly recommending Greg Costikyan's "IT ALL STARTED WITH PAPER" article, a broad survey of board gaming. Very well written. I have disagreed with some of Costikyan's conclusions before, but can't argue with this piece. Check it out.

A Random Gnome's Lair

Found a great blog from (who else? Jim!) called the GNOME'S LAIR. Dunno who's running this but I like his style-- very nostalgic in places, especially about "retro" computer games. And if you read here regular, you know I'm ALL about nostalgia.

Little Ol' Me? In a Podcast?

Last thing: I've agreed to assist Tom Vasel in future podcasts for THE DICE TOWER, contributing samllish bits mostly dedicated to wargaming as a sort of "replacement" (though not really) for the outgoing Joe Steadman. I'm calling my section THEORY AND PRACTICE, because I don't really want to focus solely on reviewing titles or what passes for "gaming news" in wargaming. For one thing, I won't be on often enough to have anything "newsworthy" to say, and for another, it gets done to death elsewhere. So I thought it might be fun to illustrate wargaming CONCEPTS, like why we do what we do... that way I can sneak in miniatures material along with my boardgame stuff. It should be fun.

So stay tuned.

Phlegm Gobber from Hell

Not that I'm a big fan of Taco Hell anyway....

This reminds me strongly of a recent DANE COOK MOVIE that came and went in point blimfark last Fall... and a notorious incident back in my college days.

Fast-Food Employee Allegedly Spits In Drink
Employee Charged After Incident

FREDERICKSBURG, Va. -- A Stafford fast-food employee is facing charges after a man told police she spat in his drink.

Shaleesheya Ford, 18, is charged with adulteration of food -- a felony charge -- and misdemeanor charges of obstruction of justice and making a false report. She faces up to 10 years in prison.

It happened April 14 at a Taco Bell along Garrisonville Road, and authorities said it started when a customer couldn't get some tea.

According to Stafford General District Court records, the 35-year-old victim, who did not want to give his name, purchased food at the drive-through window but received a different drink than the iced tea he ordered.


He said he complained and later got the drink. But when he opened it up he saw "a strange substance" floating in the cup. Court documents revealed the substance was saliva.

The man said he asked for iced tea, but was told the restaurant was out. Then, he said he was handed soda without ice and that the employee acted suspicious.

"She said, 'Have a nice day, sir' and then giggled about it," said the victim, who did not want to be identified.

(editor: Quote of the week coming right up!)

"I would honestly say, and I'm not trying to gross anybody out, but it had the strong mucus of somebody who had a cold, and was dark in color."

Customers were disgusted by what had allegedly happened.

"It's kind of alarming to think that you could go through a drive-through and get some spit in your food," said the customer.

Investigators later linked the incident to the woman.

"Taco Bell is firmly committed to providing the highest level of food safety to our customers," said Taco Bell Corp. representative Rob Poetsch in a statement released Friday. "Our franchisee does not tolerate this behavior and has terminated the employee for violating our strict food handling policies. Our operator will continue to cooperate with authorities in their investigation."

Ford faces arraignment next Tuesday.

(attribution: NBC4.com)

Who Said?

Here's a great idea for a podcast. Each week (or sometimes multiple times a week) the podcaster reads a passage from a book. You have to guess the book, character and author.

There's no big prize other than having your name read out next week when they read the answer. Just that vague feeling of intellectual snobbery that a reader has in a world of TV junkies.

I strongly recommend this. I've permanently linked it on the left hand sidebar, or you can click RIGHT HERE to go to the WHOSAID homepage. The show archive is HERE if you want to try your luck at past shows.

Vaughn Bode

The world lost a great talent when Vaughn Bode accidently strangled himself while masturbating.

Women in the Military Memorial, Arlington Cemetary

One of the great tragedies of war is that so many young men and women have their hopes and dreams cut short by loss. An even greater tragedy is when we, the living, forget what the fallen have done for us. I recently attended a retirement ceremony at The Women In Military Service For America Memorial (at the Gateway Arch to Arlington National Cemetery). The ceremony was poignant, moving and rife with tradition, as they tend to be. I go to a lot of these things.



What made this retirement ceremony different was the display in the lobby of the Memorial building.. four concave sections of portraits of service men and women who have paid the ultimate price of service in Iraq and Afghanistan.





What made this project so moving was that each soldier's image was a portrait done by a wide variety of artists, in a wide variety of media. So, rather than gaze at a long series of military official portraits that sort of blend together, we are seeing a fairly unique representation of that individual's life. This exhibit is called FACES OF THE FALLEN, and will be at the Women's Memorial until May 31, unless it's held over.

What follows is a short list of the several hundred portraits that are on display. These are the ones that immediately caught my eye-- there are dozens and dozens more, but I don't have the bandwidth (or time) to display them. Where I can make out the name, I'll mention it. I took pictures of many more and will have a SLIDESHOW of the ones I didn't link to here at the end of this post.


Sgt Todd Robbins, USA


Unfortunately I can't make out the names in this light. Loved the etched black media here... very "monumental"


Again, the light was bad and I can't make it out. You get a sense of the PERSON in the portrait on the right...


The etched smoked glass portraits were spooky looking, and very dramatic


The parchment style portrait here was very effective. Note the change that is on many of the portraits. This was a common phenomena at the exhibit


Staff Sgt. Clint Ferrin, USA and Sgt. Daniel London(?), USA. Wonderful portraits. I like the bright colors that contrast with the somber mood. These faces look playful.


Can't make out the guy on the left, but that's Captain Tyler Fey on the right (USMC). Love the Terra Cotta 3D effect

Perhaps the most poignant pictures were the ones with NO faces.. they hadn't gotten around to painting them yet. Like for Specialist Cody Wentz, USA and Lance Corporal Jared Hubbard, USMC.


No images painted yet

I will overload this account if I attempt to paste every one of the pictures I took here. However, I have prepared a SLIDE SHOW for you to view them all on FLICKR, if you are interested.

If you are in DC and have the time, I strongly recommend you catch it before 31 May of this year. You can also look up the fallen on the website link above, but not all of the artwork is available online yet.

If you wish to donate so that the exhibit will be able to go on tour, please click HERE.

Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, there was a small gaming company in Texas that published a wide range of mostly SF and Fantasy games, called Metagaming. Metagaming Concepts published a variety of boxed games of various sizes, but the series that is indexed here focuses on a revolutionary concept the company came up with starting in 1979 with the publication of a little game named OGRE... namely "Microgames". These were small, easy to carry (all of them fit in your pocket) and never cost more than three dollars. I bought almost all of them back in the day, when most of them were already out of print, and I have for certain played almost all of them.

The production standards of micros were pretty thin. Strip cut counters you had to cut yourself. a small 11 by 17 map that folded four times. Four color separation was considered an expensive luxury. They'd be laughed at today. Still, there was a lot of game in these micros, though a lot of them were marginal as the company's fortunes declined.

This series has been published here in 8 articles throughout the blog, starting back last Fall. This post will be the master index if you need to navigate through the series. The index (below) will be at the bottom of every post.

Stand by for series 2, at some point in the next 2-3 weeks.

Now, there were several games in this series, but I'm breaking them into four categories:

1) The Fantasy and Science Fiction Series (outlined in Series 1)
2) Micro-Quests for the Fantasy Trip system, which also were numbered in the series. I won't be going into these in any kind of depth, because Ty Beard has done a superlative job of supporting the original Fantasy Trip system on this site: http://www.reese.org/tft/ Joe Hartley goes into the microquests (including box art) in some detail here: http://tft.brainiac.com/. To add any more to this would be repetitive and to be honest, I only played a few of them. I was more of a D&D fan.
3) The METAGAMING series was a series of much larger (not pocket sized) games in cardboard boxes and with diecut counters. They weren't micros and they cost about ten to fifteen dollars (edit: Joe Scoleri points out that they were closer to 7 dollars. The BOXED games were in the 10 dollar range). I don't think they fit in this series but may get back to them at a later date.
4) The METAHISTORY series were a small series within the larger group of micros that concerned themselves solely with historical subjects. This will be Series 2, and it will be substantially shorter than 1.

References:
1) A particularly good GEEKLIST about Metagaming Micros. You can see where I broke out the history games from this.

2) Microgaming HQ Archives

3) Brian Train's LITTLE WARS

4) Another TFT page

5) The Metagaming Ludography, what I checked this list against.

6) Joe Scoleri's Microgame Museum, longterm source for images and important trivia regarding micros.

7) Marginalia has a rather nice restrospective essay on micros, and Metagaming in particular.

---

Metagaming Nostalgia Project Posting Index

1 OGRE and Melee

2 WarpWar and Olympica

3 Starleader: Assault, Chitin:I and Dimension Demons

4 Rivets and Black Hole

5 G.E.V. and Holy War

6 Ice War, Annihilator/One World, and Hot Spot

7 Invasion of the Air Eaters and Artifact

8 Trailblazer, Helltank/Helltank Destroyer, and Lords of the Underearth

---

Finishing Up!

Well we have four left in the Fantasy and Science Fiction series, by my counting. Fortunately two of them are in a series.

So we'll take a look at both of them together at the same time.

Microgame #20: Trailblazer

This is one of those games that could have gone somewhere, with a little care and effort. First of all, it's a Greg Costikyan design, and he can deliver.
However, he also has a tendency to throw in everything AND the kitchen sink in his designs, and all his games I've played have a heavy micromanagement factor. Trailblazer has this in spades. To begin with, it is not a wargame in any sense of the word. It's a discovery and economic trading game. There's no combat whatsoever. You start with some mapped stars
and a few trading routes. Then you fill the map in with star system chits and discover new places to trade with. There's a HUGE amount of bookeeping in this game-- charts and graphs and whatnot, all typeset with an IBM Selectric typewriter.. yick.




The closest analogy I can come up with is that old Stellar Trader game we played on mainframes and BBSs a long time ago, but with your own charts to fill out instead of a computer doing all the work for you. Not a bad premise, but a lousy game in execution. With better graphics (or as a computer game) it might have been quite impressive.



The components were incredibly sub-par.. nice use of color but the map is a grid and the rulebook is typed and copied, on reduced size paper. I love the idea of a complicated economics game done in this size and format, but it's no surprise to me that this game was a flop. It's just not all that fun. I tried a few homemade fixes for it, including creating pirates and arming ships to have some form of intercompany fighting between ships... the problem was that there was always a better looking or playing game out there that already existed, so I finally gave up. Costikyan meant this game to be a game of trading and economics, not a game of ship to ship combat. Unfortunately, not that many people are running to the shelves to buy economics games.

Microgames #19 and #22: HELLTANK and HELLTANK DESTROYER

These two games are really ONE game with a continuation of the game as an expansion product. Phil Kosnett designed these games and later went on to become a very reliable and capable foreign service officer (and is our current ambassador to Iceland).

Kosnett's approach seems to be to recreate the general gaming themes of Metagaming's earlier huge successes, OGRE and GEV, but with, let's say... a "grittier" feel. Hell Tank is actually not a bad little design, perhaps the last "Unembarassing" product Metagaming made. Hell Tank and Destroyer had many great elements that always seemed missing from OGRE/GEV, like air support and patrol boats, and various forms of mobile artillery. Tactically, this series seemed more like "warfare" to me, but it didn't have the simple zen-like elegance of OGRE/GEV. Alas, the previous game may have stolen this one's thunder.

The theme and "milieu" may seem very, very similar to OGRE/GEV, but the mechanics were different enough to be of interest. Instead of boring old Igo-Hugo, the game is fought by moving one, having your opponent react to you, then you move back again. Highly interactive, almost impossible to play via pbem. Such is life.

Graphically, the Helltanks were pretty impressive for this point in Metagaming's existence. Some money was spent on color, diecutting counters(!!) and the second map (Helltank Destroyer) has more color in it than most Metagaming titles ever did. A pity the trend could not continue.



Essentially, DESTROYER adds more cool units (including naval ones) and adds some new scenarios. It really fleshs out the package nicely. The maps are supposed to be "geomorphic" and match up together, but they really don't.. the roads don't align.

In summary, Helltank's a better game than Metagaming had put out in a long time. It didn't do well through an accident of timing.

Microgame #18: Lords of the Underearth

This one is really puzzling me. I know I have it somewhere in a foot locker. I remember cutting out the counters and the maps (see anon). I remember playing it and thinking that "they" (Metagaming) were trying to pull a fast one and recreate
THE FANTASY TRIP. The game is supposed to be set in some Dwarven caverns that are being overrun by Orcs and Trolls if memory serves. The map was a true geomorph, meaning it was printed into four strips that could be cut into quarters or left
as is. If you quarterd the map it could be laid out in a variety of layouts. There were a few scenaros. I remember it being a mostly RPGish fantasy skirmish game, tied in somehow to the existing Fantasy Trip system but somehow (if I recall) it was being developed as the next phase for the base game.

I remember the artwork was very good for this phase of the company's life. The map was excellent and the line drawings of the dwarves and orcs and such were just plain great-- far better, in fact, than the origial MELEE and WIZARD artwork. Like the rest of this bunch, it came around kind of late and wasn't exactly innovative enough to set the world on fire.

And that's the end of the Fantasy and Science Fiction games done by Metagaming. I will continue with the Meta-Histories as a separate unit, and will not touch upon the mini-quests done for The Fantasy Trip-- they have been profiled elsewhere.

---

Metagaming Nostalgia Project Posting Index

1 OGRE and Melee

2 WarpWar and Olympica

3 Starleader: Assault, Chitin:I and Dimension Demons

4 Rivets and Black Hole

5 G.E.V. and Holy War

6 Ice War, Annihilator/One World, and Hot Spot

7 Invasion of the Air Eaters and Artifact

8 Trailblazer, Helltank/Helltank Destroyer, and Lords of the Underearth

---

The Hadley Report

Unfortunately, the pictures appended to this report keep getting stripped from the email messages (I suspect they need to be sized correctly, but we'll go "baby steps" here). So I expect I'll get them when Jay returns. Anyhow, this is Jay Hadley's report from SALUTE ZERO SIX. I've always wanted to go to this show, the largest miniatures show in the world they say, though HISTORICON might give it a run for its money.

Mr. Nizz

Here I am at the Ex-Cel Center in London. Huge does not describe this
place. This convention is held in one vert small part of the buildingm

More later

Jay


(image a picture here.. and if you can't imagine it, here's a link to the ExCel center's map image)

We are about one hour before openning. I am standing in front of the
bring and buy. It consists of 12 six foot tables. Honest. Lots of GW
stuff-- heavy on the space maines and Urban Chaos. Also board games and lizard men.

The dealer area is very simular ours ranging from bone fide
manufacturers, to junk dealers, to booksellers. Considerably more fantasy dealers
than we have. I have just seen the Companion figure range up close and
personal. Outstanding.

(Note: Of course, one benefit of the dealer's hall at Salute is not having to pay transportation and import mark up on various stuff like GZG, Amazon, etc. Check out GZG's new Walker Tanks in 15mm! Check out the grav tanks by the same manufacturer..)

The organizers of the convention have just called a fire briefing
meeting for the staff. They have about 50 staff which they outfit in
greenish yellow road crew nylon jackets with the name of the club on them.

The hall is one big room: 11,000 square meters. There is plenty of
room to move around.

I am looking at a game board for a Rorke's Drift game which is very
nice. (Note: Jay may not have been able to send photos but fortunately some of my English friends pointed me in the right direction: Rorke's Drift One, Rorke's Drift Two)

Most of the game boards look like ours including the green matt on the
table approach. Howevern I have just stumbled upon a game called
Cloudships of Mars that have the most incredible air ships in 25 mm It is a
take off on Frank Chadwick's colonial martian rules

(Note: That would CLOUDSHIP AND AETHER FLYERS, I think.. debuted in 2004 if I'm not much mistaken...)

More later

Jay


(Note: I've seen pictures of that cloudships game... it's awesome. Pretty heartening to know that they still use green felt cloth to run games with across the pond, isn't it?)

and later on:

Nizz:
The doors opened 30 minutes ago. People entering were greeted by Darth vader
and a handful of stormtroopers. Inside the doors are three ECWReenactors
and a cannon. It costs 8 pounds to enter and you have to have exact
change, no credit cards. However, most dealers accept them.

There were at least 2,000 people in line when the doors opened. Lots
of fantasy games, and the buyers are three deep at the Forge World
booth..

The average age of the gamer is younger than ours but the large fantasy
presence may have something to do with that..

In a large cordoned off area in the center of the hall is a group of
late roman/arthurian reenactors. There precisely two people watching them.

The games are fairly well attended. The fantasy games are doing the
best

The warlords have a large info area where they sell mugs, dice and pens
plus afew t-shirts at 15 pounds each.

More later
Jay


(Note: This sounds like a smashing time to me. The crowd seems unbelievable by our standards-- 5000 people in attendance in a singl day! My hat's off to the organizers of this one, South London Warlords)

Mister Nizz

I left Salute at 2:30. The organizers estimated about 5,000 paid
attendees and up to 1,000 free passes.game runners get in free. As do
minors, dealers and volunteers.

Dewler reaction was varied. Some like the Perry !rothers and Forge
World were very busy others not so much.

The difference between pounds and dollars do is not made here. An
Osprey book costs 11.50 pounds here or almost 20.00 dollars. I spent as
much for figure here as in the states.

The bring and buy is a bad idea. The quality was as good or bad as
ours and the amount of itmes available was far less. They only had 70
feet of table space. The crowds were always four to five deep.

I picked up a couple of program books. I'll send one to you. Nicely
done but lacking a lot of information especially abut games.

Got to run.

Jay



It seems that I have bad news about any photos. I am not certain
anything came out. Won't know until I get home.

Please feel free to share my comments

Regards
Jay


Thank you, Mr. Hadley! Enjoy the rest of your trip!

Other cool games at SALUTE: Back of Beyond, Bugs! Rolling Hot, Death of an Admiral. This show was a visual feast.

That was fun. I should have asked him if he could find a "Battle of Five Armies" for me while he was there (DOH!). You can't think of everything.

I look forward to seeing the programme. These guys seem to be much more "club centric" than American chaps. And they aren't the history snobs we seem to be.

Jumping back in

I know, it's been a while. Some of these games were, at best, one-shots, one-plays and easily forgettable. Particularly the ones up for review tonight.

Microgame #16: Artifact

Fantastic premise. A sort of near future tactical match up between astronauts on the moon... Soviets versus Americans. The big fight is over a deux est machina device called the Dingus, an Alien "artifact" of immense technological consequence. I would have preferred to have the graphics a little cleaner and I would have been willing to do away with the alien crap totally.



The mechanics were pretty danged simple for the concept, and didn't focus entirely on combat, which I liked. However, they were hardly what I considered a reasonable simulation of combat in low-gee. There's a lot you can do with this premise; they just went for the simplest of interpertations with it.

Microgame #12: Invasion of the Air Eaters

This is a game of invasion of Earth by mysterious alien invaders bent of sucking out all the atmosphere to replace it with some alien environment (that bit is pretty vague)... the game is played out on a global stage; aliens versus all the nations of Earth (represented by some lame silhouettes and NATO counters). The Aliens can pretty much kill anything the earthlings throw at them in a straight up fight but there are ways to combine to make a decent fight

The rules were pretty horrendous, which was too bad; the designer (Keith Gross) was not without talent. One thing I liked was that he did manage was to craft a situation where the aliens and humans were very, very different from each other.



Air Eaters has its fans and it has its detractors; I played it a few times (more than Artifact, that's for sure). I recall the game having some character and an interesting setting, but kind of a hard slog to get through and not very exciting.

References:

An Archive page on the Wayback machine of Mark Johnson's Air Eaters AAR (from 1996)

---

Metagaming Nostalgia Project Posting Index

1 OGRE and Melee

2 WarpWar and Olympica

3 Starleader: Assault, Chitin:I and Dimension Demons

4 Rivets and Black Hole

5 G.E.V. and Holy War

6 Ice War, Annihilator/One World, and Hot Spot

7 Invasion of the Air Eaters and Artifact

8 Trailblazer, Helltank/Helltank Destroyer, and Lords of the Underearth

---

Happy You Day, Sweetheart

You're still looking good after all these years.



Let's hope we don't do something stupid and ruin your health.

Love, the Tenants..

BPD Round 5 Categories

The secret letter is M

CATEGORY ONE: A Christian Saint (note: I didn't say a Catholic saint, specifically)
CATEGORY TWO: Some example of "candy"
CATEGORY THREE: Something that keeps George Bush up at night. (Note: It could be an issue of some sort, or maybe not)
CATEGORY FOUR: A World War One Infantry Weapon
CATEGORY FIVE: A European land battle subsequent to the year 1700
CATEORY SIX: Any wargame published by a company other than SPI*, Avalon Hill, or GMT


(*including DG's SPI reprints and inheiritied magazine games, but NOT games native to DG)

Follow up to: Another Point of Singularity: The Unintentional Hilarity of outing Gay Vito

Some Spoilers
If you read The Previous Post About "Gay Vito" on the Sopranos, you'll know that I was impressed that the subject came up in such a macho milieu as a New Jersey mafia family. My position last week was that Vito would admit up to it and either get whacked or Tony (Soprano) would accept him the way he was and deal with it.

It didn't exactly happen that way, but the last show did indicate a fourth option I hadn't considered: Gay Vito would be outed, the crime bosses would get word of it, and Vito would just bail on the entire lifestyle. Which is what he does. Vito gets word of Tony's desire to "Have a little discussion" and knows the jig is up for him. He grabs some emergency cash and leaves home at high speed, heading north to try to find some cousins in New Hampshire. His car breaks down in the middle of a rainstorm, and he pathetically trudges up the road until he stumbles on one of those tourist-y New England towns in New Hamsphire. Checking in to a bed and breakfast, you see him looking enviously on the openly gay couple that eat breakfast in the diner he is in. We last see Gay Vito in an antique shop, staring fixedly at a vase.

Back in NJ, the rest of the organization gets wind of things and the word spreads fast. Seems like everyone knows that Vito is a member of the "Pink Brigade" now. The old timers have predictable reactions: they want to rub him out for the 'honor of the family'. Tony, NOT so surprisingly, doesn't. "There's just these guys that want to make a hit all the time and not think of anything beyond it, constantly..." and "When you get right down to it, there's a part of me that wants to say "take a pass, and God bless.. I don't give a f*ck what you do in your private life". Even though Tony was framing things in extremely selfish terms ("If it weren't for Vito last year, I wouldn't have been able to BUY my boat"), he still recognizes that Vito, the professional, is still a very proficient and ruthless guy at what he does... so in a weird way Tony is the most un-homophobic guy in the whole gang. Good writing.. for the most part.

It wasn't exactly revolutionary, but I was hoping the character would stick around for a couple more episodes. I thought an openly gay gangster would have been an interesting plot twist in such macho surroundings.

acetate3: the mysterious RSS feed

Your protopage must have a RSS feed to Another Point of Singularity, cuz I've noticed you log in every day. Other than you originate from the Marriot Corporation, I don't know much about you. Why don't you say hello?

Cheerio,

Mister Nizz

Washington is a monumental kinda town. Well, in the statue sense of the phrase. Seems like every nook and cranny of the 50 mile Federal enclave has some statue or memorial or special interest group honored in granite, steel and concrete for all time. Here's a monument that most people don't get to see:



KRYPTOS, the work of sculptor Jim Sanborn, is on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency. Shaped like a flowing Bezier curve, the statue is covered on all sides with cyphertext. The Sanborn cyphertext is remarkably hard to penetrate; only portions of it have been solved and there's a big chunk that has eluded amateur cypher analysts since it was installed in 1999. Now, it turns out, the sculptor made a small typo, which has rendered that portion of the cypher unsolvable. D'OH!!!

For more than a decade, amateur and professional cryptographers have been trying to decipher an encrypted sculpture that sits on the grounds of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Three-fourths of the sculpture has already been solved.

But now Jim Sanborn, the artist who created the Kryptos sculpture, says he made a mistake. A previously solved part of the puzzle that sleuths assumed was correct for years isn't. The new information, including what the mistaken text really says, is creating a buzz among enthusiasts who've been obsessed over the sculpture for years.

Accredidation: WIRED NEWS

I am something of a cyphertext enthusiast, myself. I have a charcoal rubbing of the front top right portion of KRYPTOS which I'm considering getting framed (I like this piece quite a bit).

What I didn't know was how much of a cult following the sculpture has (besides myself, I mean). Here's some online information for the amateur crypto geeks out there:

TRANSCRIPT of KRYPTOS (formatted HTML)

CIA Analyst Cracks sections 1-3

NPR interview with Sanborn

Elonka Dunin's radio broadcast (underground) focusing on Kryptos

Skype on the move!

As you may recall from Gee, Babs, I'm GaGa for Skype, I'm a fan of the new Voice-over-IP service and have an account there (look for mrnizz). Like a lot of nifty things on the Internet, Skype's about as useful as you can make it, and unfortunately, having a service available only on my home laptop isn't that useful. Unless I walk around with a microphone and earphones plugged into a laptop all the time, that is. Recent developments have changed that.

According to Endgadget, NetGear is releasing a new SKYPEPHONE... a phone that is designed specifically to connect to the VOIP service.



The phone isn't anything special, it appears to be a Sony Ericsson t630 phone with a new label on it. And the buy in price is steep. However, what you save over time might make it worth it to you.

HERE is the story from NETGEAR

SKYPE HOME PAGE

I may look into this when the price drops.