Game Design: Character-Building Exercise

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 11, 2010

Modern CRPG design philosophy, at least so far as I can grasp from interviews and games, seems to hold that it is a sin to make a player wade through the character generation process prior to letting them get to “the fun part.” Character generation should be as streamlined as possible, minimized, and preferably delayed […]

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Minecraft – Playing With Fire

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 21, 2010

Okay, I’ve only dabbled in the runaway indie hit Minecraft. Somehow I’ve managed to avoid getting sucked up into its soul-consuming vacuum of endless possibilities. However, this particular tutorial video had me laughing so hard I started coughing at the end. Hat tip to Indie Games – The Weblog for this one!

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Best Game Cover Art?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 16, 2010

One annoying tendency I’ve discovered with some  indie digital download games is that there’s a depressing lack of cover art sometimes. It seems this is more often an issue with newer indies on their first release, as they tend to be far more willing to invest in an impressive cover piece on their second or […]

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Our Colorful Past…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 23, 2010

Many years ago, when our youngest daughter was probably around five or so, she asked us if the world had color when we were children. We chuckled and explained to her that the world had always had color, but it was merely the photographs and movies we had back then that were in black & […]

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So What Are You Playing This Weekend?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 31, 2010

So – just out of curiosity here, what games are YOU playing this weekend? I mean besides Starcraft 2. 🙂  (I don’t have it, myself, and don’t have time to play. ) Just kinda curious where tastes and spare time is running… As for me – besides Frayed Knights, I’m planning on putting a little […]

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“Text Adventure” Mini-Playthrough of Age of Decadence

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 28, 2010

For your amusement: Who Likes Text Adventures? A play-through of one of the several text-adventure sequences in Age of Decadence. It’s already started, so it’s a little late to be one of the players I think. But it’s fun to see what they are doing with their choices.

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Merchant of Venice, Citizen Kane, and… Din’s Curse?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 22, 2010

We’re in Cedar City, Utah this week. It’s home to the Utah Shakespearean Festival which is going on now, so we hit The Merchant of Venice tonight. It was my daughters’ first live Shakespeare play, and I wanted them to see a comedy rather than a tragedy. I don’t think we could have picked better. […]

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New Fan-Made Ultima Remakes!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 7, 2010

First off: Ultima IV: Flash Version I’m actually pretty impressed with what I’ve seen of this. Besides porting the (now public domain, courtesy of EA) Apple II version of Ultima IV to Flash for browser play, the author – Blair Legget, an out-of-work mainstream games industry veteran – also took it upon himself to make […]

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Old 666

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 6, 2010

In addition to RPGs, I’m also an aviation and flight sim buff, and I get a little geeked over military history. Yes, I could totally grow a beard and become a wargamer. But I won’t. Probably. Over the weekend, I discovered the story of “Old 666.” I was watching an old episode of the History […]

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Happy 4th of July!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 4, 2010

While it may be just another day in the rest of the world, here in the U.S., this is a special day… We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit […]

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Cute Knight Kingdom Expansion In the Works!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 16, 2010

I dunno how I missed this – I’ll find someone to blame later (I thought it was only a “deluxe” version!)- but Georgina is mentioning work on an upcoming Cute Knight Kingdom expansion in this blog post… about a lingerie outfit. And no, it’s not quite as titillating as it sounds.

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Spiderweb Software Announces Avadon: The Black Fortess

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 28, 2010

So if you were wondering what Spiderweb Software would do now that they have concluded both of their award-winning RPG series, the mystery has now been at least partly revealed in a press released yesterday: Avadon: The Black Fortress Man, and here I was thinking he was going to retire and make hidden object games… […]

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My Hopes In the Coming Zombie Apocalypse

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 28, 2010

If and when the zombie apocalypse happens, I hope it consists of slow zombies (like in Shaun of the Dead), and not the fast zombies like in Left 4 Dead. The reason being is that I’m not as fast as I used to be, and so if zombies are slow and shuffling, it’ll be easier […]

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Game Design: How CRPGs Warped My Brain, Part 3

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 19, 2010

So here’s the continuation of the series about several CRPGs over the last three decades and how they did damage to my head and influenced my feelings on games and game design (you can read part 1 here, and part 2 here). So here are a bunch more games, principally from the end of the […]

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Game Design: How CRPGs Warped My Brain, Part 2

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 15, 2010

So if you will indulge me a bit more on this bit of naval-gazing, I’m going to continue to cover a fairly a fairly subjective discussion about how my opinions of gaming and game design were shaped (or warped and twisted) by various CRPGs (and a couple non-CRPGs) over the decades. It’s a good thing […]

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Government Accounting Office on Piracy: It Sucks, But We Still Don’t Know How Much

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 14, 2010

Well, duh. So we know it’s a drag on the economy – our overall economic growth. But we now know that we STILL do not know how much of an impact it is. Maybe it’s insignificant (I doubt it), maybe it’s crippling (I doubt that one too). All we know is that it sucks. Somehow, […]

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