Yachts Are Evolving – Into Starships?
Early space travel was never going to be cheap… When I came up with the story of Hotel Caledonia (mission 7 of Black Ocean: Mercy for Hire), the idea of subsea cruising was supposed to be part of the futuristic novelty. The Venetian Dream was a submarine kitted out...
The Puzzled Patron
I'm doing a little bit of a different take on the "fantasy board game" theme this week. This is a puzzle, but one whose artwork speaks directly to the D&D parts of my fantasy gamer soul. The Magic Puzzle Company (side note: always reminds me of the company names...
The Witcher – One of the few times you don’t need to read the book first
Back in 1990, Polish author published a short story collection whose title, in English, was The Witcher. In 2008, someone translated the first of a series of novels in that universe into English. In 2007, CD Projekt produced a video game version. And in 2019, the...
What Has Nine Lives and Is Stuck in a Loop?
A premise does not a story make. This one comes up time and again in Author Scrapheap. A lot of times I come up with a story idea that’s really just a tiny premise with possibly a thin plot notion attached, almost like an apology note stuck under someone’s windshield...
Incoming Transmission: Space Stations Are Hard Enough to Fix…
If only the antenna wasn’t the first thing broken. Incoming Transmission is a co-op puzzle game wherein a team tries to complete a set of repairs to a space station. One player is given the details of a mission to accomplish, then broadcasts that to the repair crew on...
Genetically engineered plants
Your Garden Center Doesn’t Carry THESE (yet…) Maybe you wanted to add a pop of color to a living space or just enjoy tending to living things and watching them grow. But people have been keeping indoor plants for a variety of reasons since ancient times. One of the...
12 Monkeys: Time Travel Cranked to 11
The Army of the 12 Monkey was just the start Terry Gilliam’s 1995 movie, 12 Monkeys, starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, was a looping time travel romp of causality and predestiny, ultimately ending in tragedy (sorry if that’s a spoiler of a nearly 30-year-old...
Endless Blanket Fort
Who doesn't love a blanket fort? …maybe when it's like Labyrinth meets Coraline. So, I’ve always loved the notion of the "X wishes" story. You’ve got the "learned a lesson" endings, the "didn’t need wishes after all" endings, the "you’re horrible and your wishes are...
Diablo: Point, Click, Loot, Repeat!
Though others came before it, 1997’s Diablo redefined and became the exemplar of the Action Role-Playing Game (ARPG) genre. ARPGs are notable in that they focus the gameplay around combat and character power while tending to downplay or deemphasize narrative...
SciFi contact lenses – the biggest monitor is the smallest
Early in Terminator 2 we are privy to a view from the terminator’s perspective. Cast in villainous shades of red, it shows an augmented reality overlay of the world, identifying objects and individuals and providing some analysis of what is on screen.New developments...