Month: September 2016

Item Seed: Emotion Blades.

Emotion Blades

These particular items look more or less like short swords with a metal hilt and a glass blade. Mind you, the metal is actually concentrated willpower and the glass is crystallized emotion, but that’s what happens when you bring an item back from the Deep Dreaming. They’re stable in our plane of existence and don’t set off metal detectors or show up on X-Ray scanners, which is really the important thing. As is the fact that, while an Emotion Blade can be destroyed, the means to do so typically does not exist in our home dimension. Continue reading Item Seed: Emotion Blades.

NVIDIA’s potentially clever Vault 1080 mod for Fallout 4.

I was sufficiently curious of this one that I actually registered with Bethesda.net in order to download the mod.  I haven’t gotten too far underground with it yet, but the lighting stuff really has been pretty neat. Although it may not be as scary as they were trying for:

I mean. NVIDIA has basically taken an ad showcasing what new stuff they’re doing right now and made it into an adventure mod.  Which is actually a very clever idea of them; assuming that the quest itself doesn’t suck, I’m happy to have them show me what funky things they can do with shadows now.  But they actually have to show them to me, which implies that my character can easily survive this adventure.  Then again, my character just rampaged across Nuka World, so that’s maybe a safe bet anyway.

My Mini- and Unapologetically Incomplete Review of Nuka World.

Short version is: if you felt that Fallout 4 has been, up to now, a bit less sarcastic and parodic than you remembered from the previous games, Nuka World will scratch that itch. I enjoyed it, although I didn’t really play it the way it was designed. I’m unapologetic about that, too. Continue reading My Mini- and Unapologetically Incomplete Review of Nuka World.

So, the Tremors TV series is going to get done by Amazon.

I would be swearing right now, except that it’s being produced by Kevin Bacon (who will, naturally, also starring in it).  That’s the good news.  The contentious news is that they’re going to be calling upon the great god Retcon, apparently:

As many of you may already know, Tremors has continued to exist in the form of straight-to-DVD productions. Unfortunately, Bacon never returned for any of them. Instead, Fred Ward and Michael Gross would make several appearances. Bacon’s character in the movie was touched upon in a quick life update, but nothing would evolve from it. In this new series, Bacon plans on putting the stories of the DVDs aside.

Continue reading So, the Tremors TV series is going to get done by Amazon.

So: good news and bad news about that the ant colony Hell thing.

Background: there’s an ant ‘colony’ in Poland whose layout will be familiar with anybody who has ever read a science fiction story about prison planets.  Essentially, there’s this one place with almost no food and at the limit of an wood ant’s temperature tolerance. So normally they wouldn’t colonize it, except that there’s a drain leading to it that wood ants regularly fall into.  So you get this colony without queens or eggs and apparently at near-starvation level; the colony keeps growing because ants keep falling down the drain at higher than replacement rates.  So, the bad news there is that – in the tradition of the aforementioned science fiction sub-genre – eventually some sort of Uber-ants* will arise, figure out a way to storm up the drain, and take revenge upon the colony that left them all to die.

The good news?  …This one isn’t actually really our fault.  I don’t think that the ants have any real reason to go to war with us, at least. I mean, sure, the drain, but that’s what you get when you build right next to a drain…

*Uberants?  Hmm.

Yeah, there’s no real impetus for remastering Mass Effect.

I can totally see this. Peter Moore of EA:

“Could we make an easy buck on remastering Mass Effect? Yes. Have a thousand people asked me that? Yes they have. Do we have… No.”

Look. I have a Mass Effect hoodie. I have Mass Effect cufflinks.  I played all three games. Loved them to death – and yes, I was fine with the ending, if only because I was feeling guilty over what I did to Shepard at that point and I needed closure. But I’m not out there playing any of the games.  They’re not endlessly re-playable like, say, Skyrim was.  Maybe if the Mass Effect franchise had stayed a pure RPG and done open world and modding I’d feel differently, but they didn’t and that’s fine.

So, yeah.  Stick to ME: Andromeda, Bioware.  That’s what I want to see.

An adaptation of Nikola Tesla’s GURPS Who’s Who 1 stats for 4e.

I needed this for something else, maybe, so since I was going to have to convert it anyway I figured that I might as well put it up here.  Please note: this is explicitly derived from the character stats found in GURPS Who’s Who 1, updated for the new edition. I made a few judgement calls and ignored the Third Edition point totals; judicious use of Talents could optimize/squeeze a few more points off of the total point cost.  Also note that this is not a cinematic Nikola Tesla. If that even means anything in this context, really.

But, hey, it might still be useful for GURPSDAY.

Continue reading An adaptation of Nikola Tesla’s GURPS Who’s Who 1 stats for 4e.