Some books have witty titles, and some have generic titles. Some have titles that live forever, entering into our collective culture, and some have bad titles that die ingloriously. Rules To Live By: Supernatural is the first supplement published for the Rules To Live By generic LARPing system.
Onkyo, best known for their high quality home theater and audio components, has entered the world of the gamer with a new line of multimedia products. The first in the line are two PC and Mac compatible USB Digital Audio Processors, and the product reviewed here, the GXW-5.1 Digital Theater Station. It's just the thing for the gamer who already has everything else and is looking for a good way to trick out his/her system.
Anyone who runs an ongoing campaign is likely, at one time or another, to grapple with the phenomenon of burnout. Developer S. John Ross makes the purpose of Risus abundantly clear from the start: it is "designed to provide an 'RPG Lite' for those nights when the brain is too tired for exacting detail... While it is essentially a Universal Comedy System, it works just as well for serious play (if you insist!)."
By the time its opening weekend is through, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone will have broken several box office records. This will be helped along by the fact that the film opened in many theaters at a minute past midnight this past Thursday. Luckily, I was one of the few (relatively speaking) to get a ticket. Should you see the film? Yes. Did I like the film? Well, that's another story altogether.
I was at home when the United States started bombing Afghanistan, so I started up my news center and started observing. During the election fiasco I became fairly good at monitoring two separate news streams at the same time, and during the terrorist attacks I perfected the skill. After information started looping enough, I started focusing on other things. I still wanted to keep an ear to the ground, but I did not want to become so over-saturated that I burnt myself out the first day in. So I booted up the PC.
To get into the spirit of Gamegrene.com, I figure I'd best begin with a rant. A rant about ranting, in fact: a metarant. This metarant is about a topic that's repeated time and again, online and off -- the call for a boycott of Games Workshop.
To remind you that not all LARP is either White Wolf World or people hitting each other with plumbing, here comes Rules to Live By (RTLB). RTLB, by Interactivities Ink, is the first in a line of LARP products, and this review will be considering the main book. In brief, RTLB is a success at what it sets out to do, and then it falters. Its core is as rock solid as they come, but RTLB is hampered by much misspent energy.
It's not often you get a brilliant new game from an unknown publisher that creates a new genre in PC gaming. Nexon has given us just that with their ground breaking title, Shattered Galaxy. Imagine playing StarCraft with a few hundred of your closest friends. Yup, a Massive Multiplayer Online Real Time Strategy.
Ever wanted to build a robot, arm it with weapons of mass destruction, and turn it loose to see what happens? How about getting some BattleBot action in on your home? Here's your chance. Mindrover: the Europa Project was released for Windows some time ago, but has recently been ported to Linux and is available from Loki games.
I've known for a long time that online gaming is not what I, or any other number of dedicated roleplayers, want it to be. EverQuest and its ilk make it paradise for those who want to beat the crap out of a never-ending stream of monsters, but it's not exactly anyone's first choice for good storytelling and memorable characters. But for awhile there was a wonderful little program called WebRPG that I thought had the potential to revolutionize online gaming as we know it. But along the way its creators made a fatal mistake, and things were never quite the same after that.
