Category Archives: Games

2nd Edition AD&D Treasure Generator

Posted on by

Here’s a little random treasure generator program I made for use with the second edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules.  Someone requested I make it available again, so here it is.

I wrote this in 1999 in Visual Basic 5.  It covers all the treasure types in the game (except intelligent weapons) plus it allows for the modification of treasure types and adds support for custom treasure types.  I guess with a little editing of the treasure types you could make this program useful for pretty much any edition of D&D.

The program still works just fine in Windows 7 64-bit.  I’ve included the entire Visual Basic 5 source code in src.zip.  Do with this what you will. It’s possible I may have missed a system file or two, but you should be able to find them online, if this is the case, as the program will tell you which files are missing.

And, no, I will not make changes to this program for you.  The source code is provided, so either learn how to change it yourself or ask someone else to do it for you.

Download Link: tresgen 1.03.zip (3 MB)

tresgen_103_1

tresgen_103_2

The Two Guys From Andromeda Return!

Posted on by

Kickstarter.com just seems to be the gift that keeps on giving.  Now, the Two Guys From Andromeda (Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe), are back together after twenty years and have started a Kickstarter project to help fund a new Space Quest game! The two guys also have some top notch voice talent lined up for the game, including the great Gary Owens! Roger Wilco may soon be cleaning up the spaceways once more.

Two Guys From Andromeda

 

Kickstarter: Carmageddon

Posted on by

“Attention all competitors: This is your one minute warning. I repeat, one minute until race commencement. Members of the public: You now have one minute to reach minimum safe distance!”

Stainless Games is looking for backers for their remake of the original Carmageddon game called Carmageddon: Reincarnation!  Pledging $15 will get you a digital copy of the game when it comes out in about a year.

If you loved the original games, show your support now!

Red Eagle

A New Wasteland (Predecessor to Fallout) Game Is Coming!

Posted on by

WastelandNow it turns out the predecessor to the first two Fallout games for the PC — Wasteland — is likely going to have a sequel made.  And the development team includes many of the original people from Wasteland and Fallout!  Here’s an interview with Brian Fargo himself.

The project is currently in the fundraising stage.  There’s a KickStarter project set up and fans of the original games have been asked to become backers.  Anyone can become a backer for as little as $1.  A minimum pledge of $15 will earn you a DRM-free digital copy of the game when it’s released. (Note: With KickStarter, you don’t actually pay unless and until the project’s financial goal is met)

It looks like they’re gaining funding fast.  In the last four hours they’ve received $30,000 in pledges.  They’re currently at about $620,000, and their goal is $900,000.

*Finally* someone is making the game thousands of people have been clamoring for.  Here’s a nice quote from the project’s Kickstarter page:

We have tried to pitch this game multiple times to game publishers, but they’ve balked. They don’t think there’s any interest in a solid, old school type of game.  This is our shot at proving them wrong. And more importantly this could help bring back an entire genre of RPGs.

It would be great if this project started a domino effect of game development studios eschewing the use of publishers (like Electronic Arts) who have been stifling the video game industry for years.  Games should be made by gamers, not businessmen.

I’ve made my pledge; how about you?

 

UPDATE: In the span of twenty-four hours the game has received nearly an additional half a million dollars.  The goal has been reached.  Wasteland 2 is a go!  Suck on that, publishers.

A New X-COM Game is Coming!!

Posted on by

Firaxis is developing a new X-COM game in the spirit of the the original Microprose series of games!  The game is planned to be released for PC, XBox, and PS this fall.  Here’s a video of the developers discussing the game, complete with video clips of actual gameplay:

Finally someone is properly remaking one of the greatest PC games of all time.  It sure took long enough.

For those who don’t know, the original X-COM series was a turn-based, tactical-level, squad combat game.  The premise of the game was that Earth was being invaded by aliens and an international military organization — the Extraterrestrial Combat Force, or X-COM — was created to deal with the threat.  The style of gameplay has become exceeding rare these days, with every other game being a first-person shooter nowadays.  Hopefully the success of this new X-COM game will catalyze the development of more turn-based games (Jagged Alliance, anyone?).

World of Tanks!

Posted on by

About a month ago I discovered a “freemium” game (free to play, with optional features you can pay for) called World of Tanks.  This Russian-made, multiplayer, online game is easily one of the best games I’ve ever come across.

The game itself is relatively simple.  It’s a WWII tank fighting game where you control a tank in a fifteen on fifteen match.

Every player has a garage where he keeps track of his tanks, their equipment, the upgrades, their crew, etc.  From the garage, players can buy new tanks, sell their tanks (not to each other), research new upgrades for each tank (using research points earned in battles), select the ammunition for each tank, buy consumables (these give temporary boosts to various gameplay aspects for one battle), buy extra equipment (like camouflage nets), and manage the crew for each tank.

From the garage, the player can select a tank with which to do battle and enter the queue for the next random battle.  Within a few seconds, the matchmaker system will put you into a team of fifteen tanks who will be squaring off against an opposing team of fifteen other tanks in one of two dozen maps.  The goal of each battle is to either wipe out all opposing tanks or to capture their base, which is done by sitting your tank in the enemy’s “base capture zone” for a long enough period of time.

Tanks controls are simple: WASD to move, mouse-look/aim, left click to shoot, right-click-and-hold to lock turret position.  That’s basically it.

But there is an underlying complexity to the game that really makes it engaging. Many things are taken into account with each shot.  The tank’s specs, the gunner’s skill, the location of the hit on the target, the thickness of the armor at the impact point, the angle of the hit, and the type of shell used all play a role in whether your shot misses, ricochets, or does damage to either the hull, a crew member, or a particular part of the tank.  A well placed shot can sometimes “track” a tank, that is, knock the tread off the wheels and temporarily prevent the tank from moving (making it a delicious target for artillery).

There are several different classes of tank, all designed to fulfill a specific role on the battlefield:

  • Light Tanks act as scouts on the battlefield due to their speed (and general lack of firepower)
  • Medium Tanks support heavy tanks and are best used in flanking operations
  • Heavy Tanks, with their thick armor, are the primary assault force, pushing forward to engage the enemy and sucking up enemy fire
  • Tank Destroyers with their (often frontally fixed) heavy guns excel at ambushes, sniping, and supporting heavy tanks
  • Self-Propelled Guns provide death from above, but they are very fragile and need to hide and be defended

Tanks are arranged into “tiers”; the higher the tier, the more powerful the tanks in that tier.  Individual tanks also have various upgrades that can be researched with experience points gained from battles: stronger turrets, better tracks, and larger, more powerful cannons.

Your tank’s crew members gain experience as you play, making them better at their jobs (which, in turn, affects how the tank handles in the player’s hands).  Commanders, gunners, loaders, and radio operators are all a crucial part of your tank, and performance suffers when they are injured or killed during battle.

There are a few minor quibbles here and there (especially with the broken “matchmaker” system which, for some reason, insists on pitting wildly outmatched tanks against each other), but, overall, this game is one of the best games I’ve ever played.

Also, two more games are in development by the same company: World of Warplanes and World of Battleships.  Sweet!

Modern War in Miniature

Posted on by

Thanks to a couple of friends of mine, I managed to temporarily get my hands on a very rare copy of the first roleplaying game ever published: Modern War in Miniature, by Michael F. Korns.  I did my best to take digital photographs of the pages of the book and create a pdf out of them.  The binding was very fragile so I could not get the pages properly flat when I took the photos, but everything is still perfectly legible.  Strangely, page 12 of the book was completely blank.  I don’t know if this was a peculiarity of the copy I had, if it was a printing error in the entire run, or if the page is intended to be blank.

This historic and little-known roleplaying game is now on its way to living forever on the internet!

 

Modern War in Miniature

Torrent Download

HTTP Download

 

 

SWTOR’s Fire Has Gone Out of the Universe

Posted on by

Well, SWTOR didn’t quite pan out as I had hoped it would.  The game is just too much of a “World of Warcraft in space” game without the eight years of development experience.  If I’m going to be on an item/achievement treadmill, it makes no sense to me to lose everything I built up in WoW only to do it over again in SWTOR.

While the game did introduce some of interesting new features to the genre (that is, the genre of the gear-treadmill, fantasy MMORPG), it did not build on what has already been learned in the genre leader, WoW, which is really the minimum that any new game in the same genre has to do.  SWTOR — as it stands right now, feature-wise — is really a game that should have come out five years ago.

It’s really disappointing that Bioware didn’t take this opportunity to make a next-gen MMO and, instead, just pumped out a prettier, less fleshed out, “me too” MMO.

 

My Saga Begins

Posted on by

Well, I was granted early access to the new MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic yesterday.  I spent about five hours playing a Sith Warrior up to 7th level.

The game is pretty cool.  What really sells it for me is the fact that all quest text takes the form of fully voiced cutscenes where you are given the opportunity to make choices in your responses.  That’s a lot of fun.  Right now, I believe that’s the game’s biggest strength.  The strong, interactive story mode is what sets the game apart from WoW.  If they can keep this sort of thing up through to the end-game and beyond, then it will really have something going for it.  Strip that away and the game is basically just a World of Warcraft clone.

This game has the potential to be good for levelling alts, if there are lots of branches in the story line.  It’s too early to really tell something like that.  For sure I’m going to be levelling a Jedi faction character, and I’ll likely level at least one other Sith faction character.

I’m a little concerned about the end-game.  I don’t know how they can continue with their greatest strength — the interactive story mode — during the unavoidable repetitiveness that typical end-game play entails.  There does not appear to be an Achievement System, which is crucial for providing goals beyond simply experiencing normal content.

Story-aside, the rest of the game is pretty much WoW in space.  It’s considerably polished for an initial release, with a lot of smart options that some games seem to take forever to figure out that they should include.  I particularly like the AoE looting option.  There is no option to automatically vendor all grey items, but apparently that’s something you can do via a companion once you get one.

There are some distinct advantages to questing in groups, it seems.  Apparently loot drops are better and/or more frequent if you’re in a group, you get “social points” — which can be spent on gear — when turning in quests as a group, and XP gains increase.  “Rolling” on the ability to have your response be the one used during story mode encounters sounds like it’ll be fun.

As a Sith Warrior, the game play is similar to a Warrior in WoW.  You start out with a basic three-swing attack — which generates Rage — and a powerful overhead strike — which requires three or four points of Rage to execute.  A lunging strike attack (my favorite so far) is yours at second level, I think, and you get an AoE smash/stun a few levels later.  So far, combat is interesting enough with those four attacks.  It’s just so much fun to do a leaping strike into a group of mobs, smash the ground with a force attack, then bash the survivors, one-by-one, into dust.

The combat animation is nice to watch, too.  It feels much more fluid than WoW’s “swing, stand there for three seconds, swing” combat.  Your guy is regularly exhibiting situational awareness animations with random parries and blocks that I haven’t yet determined which are just for show or are the result of actual active defense against incoming attacks.  One cool moment was when I was swordfighting this one mob when a second mob comes at my rear left flank and takes a swing at my back; my character flipped his sword over his head and blocked the attack against his back, then continued swinging toward the first mob in front of me.  The sound effects in game are great as well, though I felt some of the sounds in the out-of-game menus to be a little off (you might notice it right away as you’re starting the game for the first time.

I was a little dismayed at the shitty attitude some players had in General Chat so early into the game.  It feels like that has bled through from WoW.  It’s a brand new game and you’re already criticizing how people are playing it “wrong”?  Give me a break.

One thing I found a little confusing was the social aspect of the game.  While it was relatively easy to start communicating in general chat, I found it difficult to figure out how to whisper to other players.  Also, I was in a group for a short time, but there was no indication where my other part members were.  I couldn’t find them in order to join up with them.  Hopefully these shortcomings are just things I’ve overlooked, but it was a little frustrating that this aspect of the game was not as intuitive as much of the rest of the game.

Overall, my experience was very positive.  While I think it’s going to be a lot of fun to play through, my initial impression was that this was definitely not a WoW-killer for several reasons:

  1. No player-generated content.  This is THE big thing that the next-gen MMOs are going to have…but it’s not in SWTOR (at least, not yet).
  2. No support for UI add-ons yet, it seems.  WoW’s support for third-party add-ons has shown the world that this is a must.  User-customization is key.
  3. The same, played-out party formula.  I’m not sure what sort of play-style will eventually de-throne the “tank/healer/dps” holy trinity of group gaming, but that’s definitely something that would be necessary to bring the freshness necessary to top WoW.
  4. What does set the game apart and above WoW — the interactive story mode — does not appear to be something that can be sustained through the end-game.

Still, it’s definitely a solid game and will, hopefully, light a fire under Blizzard’s britches that will result in improvements to both WoW and to Blizzard’s future MMO, Titan.

Xenomech

Wow! I look exactly like me!