Saturday, 9:00 PM (New Media Track) Chesapeake, Everything Old Is New Again: Now grandma and baby can both love Battlestar, If Hot Topic weren’t proof enough, all the stuff that’s old is new. Power Rangers, Doctor Who and many anime and science fiction shows aimed at younger audiences still keep their followings as they grow up. We explore favorite franchises and how much better they’ve aged than their fanbase.

Sunday, 12:00 Noon (New Media Track) Derby Room, Lovecraft Mythos Cagefight: Who Would Win in a Fight? Moderator Norm Sherman Cthulhu vs. Dagon? Yog-Sothoth vs. Shub-Niggurath? Would the match be a TKO or won on points?

Sunday 3:00 PM (Gaming Track) Parlor 1041, Creating Aliens and Their Culture, Moderator Kory Kease – One of the most exciting elements of a campaign, game world, science fiction/fantasy series (book TV, etc.) is the adventure of meeting and discovering new cultures that

Sunday 4:00 PM (Readers Track) Belmont Room, The Heinlein Panel – Moderator David J. Williams – How much math do people really need to know in our Age of Computers? Should we really have to solve a quadratic equation to be eligible to vote? How necessary is it to know calculus nowadays? Is there value in learning math beyond the solving of such problems?

Looks like there’s a little something for everyone there and I’m looking forward to every one of them.

In addition, I’ll be trying to attend all of Mur Lafferty’s events, and John Cmar’s events, and Command Line, and Jared Axelrod, and J.R. Blackwell… and… and…

Somewhere in there I need to sleep, too. Whew.

If you like superheros and in particular works that deflate the somewhat overblown tropes of the genre, then I recommend this book. Keepsie Branson is one of a group of people with apparently useless superpowers — hers is the power to prevent anyone from taking things from her. But when she is given a mysterious object by a supervillain, she and her friends become embroiled in a conflict between both “good” and “evil” — and it’s not clear which side is which. The results will change the destiny of Keepsie and her city forever.

But don’t take my (admittedly biased) word for it — go to Amazon and read some of the other reviews there. And buy a copy today, if you can!

For those of you in the southeast of Australia, there is a major videogame exhibition going on now in Melbourne until Sunday, July 13:

The largest ever exhibition dedicated to the past, present and future of videogames, Game On has toured the world, being presented at major international cities across the globe including Helsinki, Chicago, Tel Aviv, Hong Kong and London.

Unfortunately for those of us in other locations, I couldn’t find any information on future appearances, so you Aussies enjoy it while you can. Perhaps someday it will return to London, its original home.

Link

When the heat goes up, the photographer gets silly…

[Link]

As far as the next show, I’m working on it now. With the recent (as in the past few months) passing of Bobby Fischer it seems appropriate to finally cover chess. I’ll be talking about my personal history, ways to get into it for novices, and ways to make it more interesting for those who either are tired of it or didn’t think much of it in the first place. If you have thoughts along those lines, drop me a line. Hopefully I’ll be recording this weekend, though with my daughter’s play and my friend’s seder, it might be tight.

And don’t worry Gygax fans, I’ll be doing D&D at some point, too. Fischer’s just first in line.

As far as other news: Yes, I’m still here, and the book I’m working on is almost through the worst of it. I’m hoping to be done with rewrites by the end of the month, and then it’s just copyediting and layout. Oh yeah, and coding for the CD — but that’s fun! In any case, there’s a good chance there will be an episode in December sometime.

Until then, thank you for all the cards and letters.

The Vicar and The Kingfish are great guys, you should really go buy a t-shirt…

For those who like swag, I’m bringing Vintage Gamer minibuttons — if you want one, you can either catch me or go by the podcasting booth in the exhibit hall.

And the kid will be with us, so if you run into Mur or I, you might meet the little princess as well…

First up is an article by listener Gnome, about the early days of the first person shooter. Good stuff, and there’s other retro gaming goodness on his blog as well, so check it out.

Secondly, if you haven’t seen it already, Ryan Dancey, former CEO of Wizards of the Coast, is predicting doom for the hobby game industry in 2007. Not strictly a vintage gaming article, but I thought it had some general interest.

Finally a couple of reprints of highly sought after (and hence expensive) board games. The first is the Games Workshop classic dungeon crawler Talisman, which is being reprinted by Black Industries, a division of Games Workshop. The second is the Avalon Hill classic wargame Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage, which is being reprinted by Valley Games, who previously did a nice job on the Die Macher reprint. The plans for Talisman are to incorporate rules from all the previous editions with some new speedy rules (huzzah) as well. Hannibal, on the other hand, will be nearly identical to the 2nd edition.

I did try to record something last night about the games we played on our beach trip, but most of it was lost due to the laptop running out of disk space (I was in the other room, trying to minimize computer noise). I’m not sure it was a complete loss, as I wasn’t 100% happy with the result anyway. It would have been a bit of a cheat to you guys in that I promised more vintage gaming goodness, and it was a bit of a ramble besides. I’ll be back next week with Dragon Quest, and then a special show I’ve been thinking about for some time.

For those curious folk, here’s the list of games we played last week:

• Arkham Horror (with Curse of the Dark Pharoah and Dunwich Horror expansions)
• Deluxe Illuminati (with the Y2K expansion)
• Settlers of Nuremberg
• Bang! (with the High Noon and Dodge City expansions)
• No Thanks
• Mexican Train dominoes
• Runebound (I didn’t play, just observed)
• Blink!
• Cap’n Clever
• Gulo Gulo (with the X-Men expansion)
• Rumble in the Jungle
• Katamari Damacy (PS2 game)
• Guitar Hero (PS2 game)

Unfortunately, we didn’t get to Lunar Rails… ah well.

As a side note, I got a chance to play the Dunwich Horror expansion to Arkham Horror last night, and I highly recommend it to fans of the original. However, as with the “Curse” expansion, shuffling the Mythos deck proved problematic (it’s frickin’ ‘uge!) so we had a run of gates opening on Wizard’s Hill. Since the Old One we were fighting spawned an extra nasty when opening a gate where one already exists, this provided some serious concerns early on in the game. So, word to the wise: shuffle well, shuffle often.

Unfortunately, Diplomacy is still unavailable. A travesty.

I somehow missed the start of publication of The Escapist e-magazine, and I find it strange that the way I found out about it is through board game blogs as it is mainly a computer gaming rag. It’s also headquartered here in Durham, NC. Small world.

However, in the past two weeks they’ve had three articles of some interest to vintage gaming types. One is a broad history of games by Greg Costikyan. Another is a very Vintage Gamer-like look back at Last Express, an adventure game developed by Smoking Car Productions and published by Broderbund in 1997. And the third discusses the possibilities of game rules as art, with a look back at some classic board games.

Speaking of computer adventure games (a vintage style if I’ve ever heard of one), the Gnome’s Lair has a review of the next installment of the Bone adventure game series. I’ve been playing the first one with my daughter (or for my daughter, as it were) and I’m definitely going to have to pick up this one at some point.

As a final note, if anyone knows why Parlett’s Oxford History of Board Games has suddenly shot up to $180 per copy, I’d appreciate knowing. If it ever drops down to $100 again, I’m definitely getting it. A reprint would also be a wonderful thing. Until then, to the library I go.

Or you could just play it. Thanks.

To satisfy your need for vintage games until then, I’ll point you to the latest episode of my friend Jason’s podcast, Random Signal, where he spends part of the time reviewing the Schmidt Spiele/Parker Brothers game Survive!/Escape from Atlantis.

Update: added pictures to my Flickr account.

Show notes:

• RPG notables in passing
• The world’s largest Monopoly board (the horror!)
• Pantheon MMBG
• Spore: Preproduction Through Prototyping
• Game Developer’s Rant
• Physical Gameplay in Half-Life 2
• Next time: back to the usual

A few caveats: I would have pictures, but apparently the drivers for my camera didn’t end up on this laptop, so I’ll upload those later. And I recorded this one outside using a small hand-held mic and an iRiver, so audio quality will be a bit different than normal as well. And no editing — just me in all my raw glory.

Show notes:

• Hello, it’s me at GDC
• The first two days — technical tutorials
• Wednesday: Sony presentation
• Wednesday: Ronald Moore (of BSG, not B5) presentation
• A bit on Will Wright and the creation of Spore
• Thursday: Nintento presentation
• Massively multiplayer board game, in brief
• Next time: more of Thursday and Friday

I’ve already ordered a German copy of Tales of the Arabian Nights. Hopefully the English conversion will be smooth.

For those who are curious about the sound quality on this one, I was trying out a new mic so I can take the show on the road. Needless to say, it won’t be with that one.

[Edited to remove enclosure - new listeners don't care, I'm sure, and it frees up a slot for a real show.]

It doesn’t sound as extensive as the Asian Games exhibit that was in Washington, D.C. last spring (missed it, alas), but it might be worth the trip if you happen to be close by one of the stops. And it sounds like a lot of the artifacts are from the main collection of the British Museum, so I suspect that if you were to go there after the tour is over you could see them there, albeit spread through the various halls.

[Edited for clarity]

In other news, I had a great time Saturday at PodcasterCon 2006. I ran into a lot of people that I had met previously at Dragon*Con: Patrick McLean of The Seanachai, Derek and Swoopy of Skepticality, and Steve Eley of Escape Pod. I also met a lot of new people: Rob Walch of Podcast 411, Dave Warner of Dave’s Lounge, Madge Weinstein of Yeast Radio, John Ong of Ongline, Rich Sigfrit and Davey Beauchamp of Requiem of the Outcast and Mister Adventure, George Smith of Eclectic Mix, Anne Bramley of EatFeed, Paul Fischer and Martha Holloway of the Balticon Podcast and the ADD Cast, Jason Erik Lundberg with Lies and Little Deaths and finally, John and Elizabeth Edwards with their One America Committee podcast. A big thank you to Brian Russell (of Audio Activism) for setting this up — it was a lot of fun and a great opportunity to hobnob with other people in the hobby/industry/whatever this is.

Show notes:

• A brief overview of my gaming background: longtime gamer and game programmer
• The purpose of the show: discussing older games of all types
• How the (old) Games 100 inspired it
• Other podcasts that also inspired: Have Games, Will Travel and Boardgames to Go
• What’s coming next