A couple of games to look at today. Here’s a taste of the second one first.

I’m getting too old for dungeon crawling.

The first is an iPhone/iPad game called Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP. Superbrothers is apparently the name of the developers. I have no idea what the EP is about. It isn’t out yet, but just look at it.

I love pretty.

Who are you calling pretty?

The second game, Desktop Dungeons, isn’t pretty, but it is fun. Even better, it’s already out and free for Windows and Macs.

FEATURING BOTH HACK AND SLASH!

A roguelike, it takes maybe twenties minutes to play a complete game. Pick your race and class and fight your way through a single level. There’s just enough resources on the map to kill the final boss, assuming you’re smart and lucky.

Muscle Man!

Me, I die a lot.

You unlock new classes and new monsters as you play, so lots of replayability.

Did I say it wasn’t pretty? I lied. The default graphics aren’t as pretty as S:S&S EP, but they look great. Except for the Barbarian. He looks like a baby.

Give me my bottle!

There you go. Something to play, and something to look forward to you. What else could you want?

The Internet is a giant slush pile, and I’m the unpaid intern wading through it. Here’s a bit of pretty dredged from the dreck.

From the Desk of the Dictator:

Welcome back to the base for everyone that attended Operation Invisible Distillation and a welcome back from your weekend to everyone else.

I’m writing this with tissues stuffed up my nostrils to deal with my bloody nose. I suppose I could go the medical department for something more dignified, but this is hardly the first time I’ve leaked the red stuff. It will stop soon enough.

This particular op took us to the mythical Caves of Oblivion, which aren’t as unappealing as they sound. Somewhere in prehistory, one of the lost pantheons of gods got into a fight with giant centipedes that were carved out of a mountain range. The Mountain Centipedes turned out to be terribly hard to kill but wouldn’t attack anything they couldn’t see. The gods dealt with them by filling a set of caverns with a mist that turned everything it touched invisible, tricking the bugs in the caves, and sealing the entrance behind them. Since no one else seems to have ever said, “Let’s go to that place where all those invisible monsters are stomping around. That seems like a good idea,” they’ve remained there unmolested for millennium.

We have no particular interest in the Mountain Centipedes, but that invisible mist they live in turns out to be perfect for part of Project Cut Flowers. Working together, the science and occult departments cobbled together some mist collectors, and I teleported into the caves with two of the extraction teams to deploy them.

I was going to have Frigid lead the teams, but Pipewrench insisted on coming along. Since he’s paying the bills on this one, I asked Frigid to mind the store while I kept him from getting killed. Upon reflection, this may have been a mistake, since we could have just stolen all of his stuff if he’d died. Oh well. Live and learn.

The deployment was a delicate business, since we couldn’t actually see anything inside the caves. Oh, we brought our sonar display goggles, but they turned invisible in the mist, seriously hampering their effectiveness. The caves are pretty big, but the bugs are still stomping around down there. Unfortunately, we lost Henchman 41L-9I (Sid) when he got stepped on. The occult department was unable to recover his soul. The divine nature of the Mountain Centipedes should have just destroyed it outright when they killed him, but the occult department tells me the enhancements of the soul catchers kept his intact. However, they could not reel it in before one of Death’s guides escorted him to the afterlife.

I earned the bloody nose at the end of the operation. We had siphoned off enough of the mist that contents of the cave were starting to emerge as faint shadows. I’d love to be able to blame Pipewrench for the injury, but it wasn’t his fault. In addition to our sonar goggles, we were also wearing personal cloaks so we would stay invisible as the mist faded. Unfortunately, the cloak for Henchman 38E-5J (Yuri) failed. One of the giant bugs noticed him within moments. I got smacked in the face knocking him out of the way of the bug’s strike. Once we were clear, a heavy weapons team pumped rockets into the Mountain Centipede, crippling it. Apparently, the problem they had with the bugs in the past was a lack of firepower.

By then we were teleporting collectors and personnel out of the caves, so I came back to my office to tend to my bloody nose and type up this memo. I think I’m going to goof off for a while now. Try not to tear down our organization for the next couple of hours. Remember, the world is already ours – it just doesn’t realize it yet.

Your Leader,

Dr. Photius Callaway

The Killing Man

There are some really good Lego stop motion films out there. This one by legolambs looks great, has good voice acting, and excellent sound editing. The skit itself would have worked well even with live actors. That means it had good writing, which is something always near to my heart.

  

(via Topless Robot)

The Internet is a giant slush pile, and I’m the unpaid intern wading through it. Here’s a bit of pretty dredged from the dreck.

From the Desk of the Dictator:

Welcome back from your weekend everyone.

I’d like to officially announce here that the scope of Project Cut Flowers has been expanded. This is a result of my meeting last week with former Technefarious lieutenant Pipewrench. A native of the Suncloud, he joined Technefarious because our style matched his, but he left us before my immediate predecessor had taken control of our organization. He’s a big man, well suited to pounding on the steampunk machines he likes to build.

The destruction of one of those clockwork devices is what brought him to us last week. So far, Project Cut Flowers has consisted mostly of stockpiling materials for Pipewrench to run through his construct. We don’t normally do mercenary work, but Pipewrench used to be one of us and was paying very well. Since we now have nearly all the things he needs, he wants to expand our contract to have us rebuild his Dimension Projector in a timely manner and to assist him in its eventual launch. I cleared it with Frigid, then told Pipewrench we’d be setting aside our own operations for his, so I’d have to charge him a great deal of money. He agreed. Then I asked exactly what happened to the one he had been working on.

It seems that he had kidnapped the heiress Persephone Guilder. He assures me his demand for her ransom was not an indication of a lack of money but just a routine operation to ensure a steady cashflow. Since I had already had the computer department hack into his bank accounts, I believed him. However, living in the world that we do, a superhero had taken it upon himself to arrange for the release of Ms. Guilder without an exchange of money. Unfortunately, that hero was Grogan the Giant Lizard-Gorilla, who is roughly six stories high and well known for his property damage skills. By the time Grogan had extracted Ms. Guilder, half of Pipewrench’s base was rubble and his Dimension Projector’s assembly strongly resembled a large golden pancake instead of a three dimensional Rube Goldbergian clockwork. Hopefully, we’ll be able to avoid a similar mess this time.

Tonight, the propaganda department has hired the Demented Resistors to do a concert for us. The musicians have been mind-altered to think they’re playing a corporate gig for the Technalysis Foundation, so everyone can relax and enjoy the show. The Demented Resistors opened for Power Bow on his last tour and are supposed to be really good. I’m looking forward to it.

On Tuesday, we’ll be holding a memorial service for Henchmen 84U-4B (Rachel) from the science department. Technically, she isn’t dead, but the experiment she was working on pulled her into a non-string based dimension and transmuted her body to let her survive there. We’re not sure exactly how it happened, and we don’t have a clue how to reverse it. Decades of Technefarious history suggest that it is best to memorialize her now.

In the latest news of our package exchange program with our rivals at the Golden Web, I sent them back a glass jar full of mutilated gummy bears. Two headed, multicolored monstrosities will stare at the recipient with twin blank gazes. Perhaps the jar’s new owner will recoil for the horror of seeing three gummy butts sealed together. Probably not – no one has ever called the Golden Web wimps. Well, except for the Powder Keg, but that’s only because their answer to everything is to blow it up.

Have a good week everyone. Remember, the world is already ours – it just doesn’t realize it yet.

Your Leader, 

Dr. Photius Callaway

The Killing Man

John Scalzi is an awfully good science fiction writer. He’s also no slouch as a live performer. When the boys from of Wootstock (Paul and Storm, Wil Wheaton, and Adam Savage) put together their show for Minneapolis in June of last year, they invited him as one of their guests.

 
NeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeRDS!

Luckily, they also release their show under a creative commons license, so fan vidoes of every Wootstock performance can be found on the internet. The Minneapolis show had particularly good recording made (thanks grnbrgb). Other segments from the particular show will probably show up in the slush pile again.

Here’s John Scalzi reading his short story, “Morning Announcements at the Lucas Interspecies School for Troubled Youth.”

 

(via Whatever)

The Internet is a giant slush pile, and I’m the unpaid intern wading through it. Here’s a bit of pretty dredged from the dreck.

From the Desk of the Dictator:

Welcome back from your weekend everyone. Turned out to be a bit more eventful than we all expected, didn’t it?

It started with a birthday party. Alpha and Gamma of the Elite Triad decided to hold a surprise party for Beta. I’m not sure why, since they’re almost one person anymore. Originally designed by D.O.K.T.O.R., the E.L.I.T.E. series were built by the second most famous leader of Technaferious to test ways to improve his own software. He used the same operating system for all three, thus Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. However, the three ended up getting along so well that they started regularly integrating their software and memories together. Nowadays, if you talk with one of them, you’re talking with all three of them, even if they are halfway across the planet from each other. I can understand why two of them would want a surprise party for the third; I’m just not sure how they managed to make that decision without involving him. Also, I don’t know why Beta is a “he” and Alpha and Gamma are “she’s.” Gamma is a short, androgynous robot, so I can kind of see that one. And yes, I’ve heard the joke about Beta being a tank with a really big turret, but Alpha is a big silver obelisk, which is just as phallic as that turret. I guess I’ll just chalk it up to the whimsies of our silicon people. 

Naturally, since Beta is literally a tank, we held the party in the parking garage. We were going to have it out in the yard, but weather control involves using forces that the Establishment can usually detect pretty easily and it rained. Unfortunately, the bustle of setting up for the party let a security breach get past our receiving department. We are stockpiling Cosmic Kinetic Fluid for Project Cut Flowers, and the latest shipment of had just come in. There are legitimate industrial uses for the explosive CKF, but not many for the amount we’ve been diverting. I suppose it was inevitable that someone was going to notice. I guess I should be just as glad that it wasn’t an Establishment strike force that snuck onto our base.

Once the party was well underway, someone discovered Henchman 11E-7P (Ned) had been knocked out, stripped naked, and tied up. I suppose in another profession, this would have set off an immediate alarm and stopped the party instead of being considered merely slightly rougher than the usual party shenanigans. Once the medical department revived him, however, he told them it was an intruder, later identified as the vigilante Flutterdie, who had attacked him.

Flutterdie is a butterfly-themed superhero wearing a powersuit created by a sorcerer from another planet, which is only a slightly more exotic than usual explanations for superpowers that I’ve heard. It’s not really a power set suited for sneaking around, which is why she stole Ned’s clothes. It is a power set good for fighting, so when the security squad finally intercepted her, she blasted her way out with her twin pistols. Everyone in the squad received injuries and Henchman 65N-7T (Turner) was killed permanently. The enchantments on her weapons nullified his connection to our soul catchers when they hit him, putting his recovery beyond our reach.

With the rest of us involved in the party, Flutterdie managed to fly away before we could move to stop her. Luckily, as a vigilante she isn’t a certified officer of the Establishment, so her contacts with them are weak enough that we didn’t immediately have the heavy hitters of the superhero world breathing down our necks. That let us do a more orderly transition to our new base than we usually manage, so our operations resumed as normal today.

The Noir Club is holding a Purple Poetry reading Tuesday night, and Henchman 43E-2W (Sherlock Stupendous) of the Occult department is doing a magic show on Thursday. I hope someone has screened his act ahead of time. The last time we had an amateur showman from that department, it took us three weeks to get all the gremlins out of the equipment. Consider yourself warned, Stupendous.

Have a good week everyone. Remember, the world is already ours – it just doesn’t realize it yet.

Your Leader,

Dr. Photius Callaway

The Killing Man

Update: Bleach tells me Alpha is phallic like a dildo, thus earning her the female designation. Thanks, Bleach.

I downloaded Champions Online a couple of weeks ago when it went free to play. Tried to get into it last week but got bored with the character creator. Not the stat building, because I chose my class pretty much at random. No, I got bored trying to figure out what my character would look like. 

I took another run at it last night, using Epiphany as my starting point since she’s one of my few superheroes whose costumes I know what they should look like. They didn’t have labcoats, so it ended up not being Epiphany. However, they did have some wicked looking butterfly wings, eventually giving us FLUTTERDIE:

 

Origin: Long story. Let’s just say that alien sorcerers are strange.

 

 

This is the default stance for female characters. I switched to the action pose.

I needed a vigilante type in Monday’s Dictator memo, so I think I’ll use my new hero there.

I bought a new iPhone. Verizon finally manage to snag it for their network, and the power supply for my Blackberry has been more twitchy than usual lately.

I’ve already intergrated it with my iTunes stuff and my email. Anyone have suggestions for additional junk I should buy for it or apps that I should download?

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