Hey Man, well this is Babylon

Obama won the Oregon primaries. Sweet. He currently (read: still) has more delegates than Hillary. Even sweeter.

Hillary needs a new do. She has Andy Warhol hair, and it’s quite hideous.

That game One that I mentioned?  Sweet Jeebus it’s hard.

I want more TV shows and movies where the main characters are ugly, or even just plain-looking.

Portland now has a gay mayor who shares a name with both a crappy beer and a long-dead former Governor. He’s also pretty handsome, too.

Anyone remember Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure? I think the character Large Marge should have her own TV show too.

Looks like I might be kicking up an InSpectres mini-campaign in June, to get read for the Iron Kingdoms game in July. This mini-campaign would be modern, and the characters would be a new franchise of the widely popular Ghost Facers company.

I’m enjoying a really good discussion on methods of player narrative empowerment within Shadowrun.

I recall a fantastic Playstation 1 game called simply “One.” It was one of the first third-person action games I’d ever played, and I thoroughly loved it. I want to find it again. So, guys, can you imagine how hard it is to actually search down and find a game called, simply, One? Yeah. It’s goddamned hard. EDIT: Nevermind, I finally found it on ebay. That was tricky.

Anyway, last night I tooled around with the settings of two pieces of Playstation Emulation software: PSX Emulator and ePSXe. The first one is almost perfect. It does everything wonderfully, plays without a hitch and a bare minimum of settings tweaking. Fabulous! Not really, though, as the graphics look pretty lame on a crisp LCD – this is because the software doesn’t make use of hardware acceleration, and thus the games look like they did originally. Not so bad, I guess, but… ePSXe, with the right settings, makes the games look a whole lot nicer, and greatly improves on the original appearances. This is great! Right? No, sadly, because no matter how I tweak the graphics, and no matter if I run from the PSX disks or from ripped ISO files, the cut scenes are always sped up a fraction and lack sound. That kinda blows. Read more

After a good deal of in-house testing and rules clarifications, I have the external Playtest Rules draft uploaded and ready to go. If anyone has a group that is open for a session or two of some quick pick-up zombie-survival gaming, please download this, give it a read, and let me know what you think. Included in the document is a sheet with a list of a handful of specific questions I have regarding the game play, and I’d greatly appreciate it if any playtesters would return to me with their answers after playing.

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Update 1/6/2009: The playtest rules have been taken offline, and the “open playtesting” stage of development has ended. Thanks for your support!

I’ve just now gotten around to setting this place up for extended use. I sense a long road ahead with this project. Ultimately, I would like to move all my games here, and set up an Alliterated Games section, preferrably with a different header image.

- Nathanael Phillip Cole