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A little more on that Fallout 76 thing…

by Aaron Williams on June 16, 2018 at 3:39 PM
Posted In: From the Mouth of Madness, Video Gaming

Following up on my enthusiasm for the Fallout 76 trailer comes (warning: blood ‘n’ violence) a compilation of gameplay and other in-game footage from E3. It pretty much confirms that it’s not going to be the role-playing game some of us hoped for. There will be quests, base building, multiplayer, and what looks a lot like a Fortnite-style experience.

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with the concept, Fallout does have a whole pile of lore that will probably have to be squared with whatever Fallout 76 presents, including:

• Why the Vault itself isn’t being used as a base of operations, shelter, or a source of materials.

• Where all of these monsters in the game came from so (relatively) soon after the war and where they went in the following 175 years.

• Why any nuclear missiles were left unlaunched at all.

• How the dragons from The Elder Scrolls managed to arrive in this setting.

While I’m not sure this will be my kind of game, I am interested to see some of the things shown in the various bits of footage explained further. The image above shows what looks like the remains of a space station. It makes me wonder if it’s a reference to some rumored content from the Van Buren project (also known as Black Isle Studios’ version of Fallout 3), namely the Ballistic Orbital Missile Base, perhaps? It could easily be something else or just a REPCONN Aerospace ruin of some sort.

If nothing else, it’ll be interesting to see what’s unveiled while we wait for Fallout 5. 🙂

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A weekend linkfest!

by Aaron Williams on June 16, 2018 at 7:35 AM
Posted In: Cineplexia, It's got Robots and Lasers, The Basement Storage Bin, Video Gaming, You call that noise "music?"

Let’s begin with a bit of news to do with a portion of my misspent youth:

• Jordan Peele is in talks to bring Disney’s Gargoyles to the big screen. If they can get Keith David, Jonathan Frakes, Marina Sirtis, and all the Star Trek actors that provided voices for the cartoon, then I’m sold. I knew the show was going to be more than the usual afternoon fare when a viking’s sword came down to smash the lead gargoyle, Goliath, who changed from stone to flesh just in time to catch the blade in one hand… and a trickle of blood ran out of his closed fist. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Oh, and if you can catch it streaming or on DVD, skip the final season when it went to ABC on Saturday mornings. They fired the head writer and the show went downhill big time.

• Sticking with movies, George Lucas’ concepts of where the Star Wars movies would have gone have come to light, and they’re pretty bad.

• More sci-fi drama in the form of Star Trek: Discovery’s showrunners being fired and Alex Kurtzman taking over their position. It’s been an entertaining enough show for the time being, but I can’t help seeing Kurtzman’s name credited with several Star Trek movie scripts I’m not fond of…

• This next item is an actual thing for sale at ThinkGeek, and while I wouldn’t buy one for myself, I have to complement whoever designed this toolbox designed like Thor’s hammer, Mjolnir.

• For those vintage video game lovers out there, good news! 70 Japanese video games thought to have been lost were found in a folder on a private internet forum. They seem to date from the late 90’s and the era of the Sega Saturn.

• Let’s end with some music and LEGO engineering. Some mad brick-scientist used robotics, a tune by Daft Punk, and perspective art to create this video for the song “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.

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Some site clean-up, printing, and scanner aftermath…

by Aaron Williams on June 16, 2018 at 12:13 AM
Posted In: From the Mouth of Madness, Sequential Artistry

There have been a few thunderstorms in my vicinity in the past week or two, and one of them knocked out my trusty ol’ Epson 836XL scanner. I had to go and find a replacement, which is of the normal-sized variety rather than the big honkin’ size of the 836. I hope to get it fixed at some point, though I can’t afford to do so at the moment, which brings me to the next item.

If you’ll look to the left sidebar, there’s a graphic for Ps238 trades at Drive-Thru Comics! Volumes 1 through 6 are available in print format via their site, with more to come as I get them uploaded and the files all nice ‘n’ neat. My son gives them a thumbs up, as he’s been reading his own copies quite a lot. As they’re all still in once piece after being in the possession of an 8-year-old for several weeks, I think the quality of the materials is quite high.

Also, I’ve replaced the ads on the site with all Google Ads, as Project Wonderful is going out of business as of August 1st. It’s sad to see it go, as it was a pretty decent way for webcomics to advertise and find new readers.

There will also be the debut of a regular written feature that my Patrons have had a preview of: The Klehbabnyan Grimoire! Imagine if the Necronomicon was a self-writing manual to Eldrich power that some poor schlub purchased from Amazon? You won’t have to wonder for long, as it’ll start being available this weekend! I’ll be posting the chapters on my Patreon page as some key words might make Google decide I should be stricken from their advertising lists, and while the money from that isn’t great, it’s better to have it than not. Anyway, the plan is for chapters to be available to Patrons a week early, as well as having an eventual ePub and PDF version for download. If it’s something you want to support, I’m happy to have your help, and thank you!

By the way, going back to the scanner thing above. When I was looking at the ones available, the store I went to had a combo scanner and printer in their “open item” section. It was a fraction of the cost of just a flatbed scanner, but a voice in the back of my head made me look up the particulars of this two-function device. It turned out that it was one of those setups where if the printer ran out of ink or quit working for any reason, the scanner wouldn’t work, either. Since it was an inkjet printer and I don’t do a lot of home printing, chances were the ink would eventually solidify and start throwing error codes. Not only is that dirty pool, in my opinion, it’s worse than those old TV/VCR combos. At least one of those would keep working if the other broke.

And what’s the deal with airline food, am I right? 🙂

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Some new Fallout 76 trailer footage, and a link to a new RPG trailer…

by Aaron Williams on June 10, 2018 at 8:42 PM
Posted In: Video Gaming

They call this a “gameplay” trailer, but it looks pretty cinematic-cutscene-y to me. Anyway, here’s some more Fallout 76 teasing:

I’m hoping that it’s got some RPG elements, as the guy in the Vault 76 jumpsuit does the most player character thing ever: He loots and wears the power armor that’s been slowly sinking into the ground for 25 years with a corpse inside it.

There’s another trailer readers might find of note, but I’m only providing a link since it’s got some pretty violent imagery. It’s Cyberpunk 2077, a game from the makers of The Witcher series. If they’ve kept the same quality level as their previous outings, CD Projekt Red should have a hit on their hands.

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Sony might have a decent Spider-Man movie on its hands!

by Aaron Williams on June 6, 2018 at 6:22 PM
Posted In: Cineplexia, Mystery Clip Theater, Sequential Artistry

This looks pretty good, with an animation style that manages to combine realism with comic-booky visuals like none I’ve seen before:

Now if only Spider-Man 2099 was in it, somewhere.

I also liked the scene with Miles’ dad in front of his school. It reminds me of an old Dave Barry column where he did something similar to embarrass his own son, though instead of using a police car, Dave had a Weinermobile.

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A post-power outage linkage post!

by Aaron Williams on June 5, 2018 at 10:31 AM
Posted In: It Came from the Internet, Nostalgia!, Science ahoy!, Tabletop Gaming, Video Gaming

For those who didn’t read my Twitter feed over the weekend, at about 4am on Saturday, a tree that was likely hollow and dead inside (I feel you, tree) a few doors down from my house was felled by the hammer of Thor. It then fell on the power lines to our entire block, plunging us into a pre-technology wasteland that lasted until late Sunday. Now that we have electrons flowing again, I can share the following bits of internet interest:

• A man who managed to survive the Mt. Vesuvius eruption that buried the city of Pompeii in 79 AD to the point that he was climbing over ash/rock that was over a story deep then died after being hit in the head with a large rock. In gaming terms, he’d managed several successful skill checks and saves, only to roll a one at the end.

• Originally made as an April Fool’s prank, Bandai is going to make “Armored Cats” toys so your Star Wars action figure armies can now face the Hiss Lords (sorry about that one).

• This next item is a link to a PDF of FOIA-released motivational posters from the NSA, straight from the 1950’s through the 1960’s. It’s interesting how many Christmas-themed ones there are, as well as obvious attempts to incorporate “hip ‘n’ cool” trends of the times.

• While we’re on the topic of Cold War paranoia, a release date has been announced and a trailer produced for Fallout: New California, a total conversion mod for Fallout: New Vegas, formerly known as Project: Brazil. From what I gather, it’s a prequel to the events of New Vegas, with several possible endings based on your decisions and actions.

• Never let it be said that the minds behind Dungeons and Dragons don’t have a sense of humor. They’ve released a trailer for D&D Beyond, their digital toolset for 5th edition, and it’s a glorious tribute to cartoon shows from the 1980’s.

• On the topic of the 1980’s, here’s an article that hails from the distant past of 2011 that had a bit of trivia I wasn’t aware of: Weird Al Yankovic was the valedictorian of his high school class. Way to break the curve, Al. We need more stories of screw-ups who couldn’t achieve much while they were teenagers to give us hope for our crumbling lives.

• A slick Unity game for you to puzzle over: Scalak challenges you to fit puzzle pieces into three-dimensional spaces. It’s a nifty concept.

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So where are Fallouts 5 through 75?

by Aaron Williams on May 30, 2018 at 12:04 PM
Posted In: Video Gaming

Bethesda has released a teaser trailer for Fallout 76, so here it is:

Vault 76 has been mentioned in the games before, most notably for Vault-Tec’s Assistant Chief Executive Officer being abducted by aliens while inspecting the site. No, really.

Edit: fixed my faulty math while snarking about numbers.

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I assume it’s something Fallout related?

by Aaron Williams on May 29, 2018 at 12:47 PM
Posted In: Video Gaming

Bethesda Softworks’ Twitch channel has been streaming basically this for over an hour:

If you want to watch the above image live, click here.

A good use for their chat window might be for any digital effects artists out there who insert technological displays into the backgrounds of scenes and need lots of scrolling characters to simulate the computer screen somehow accomplishing something. If nothing else, you can see the chaos of up to 70,000 viewers trying to tell Bethesda to get on with whatever they’re teasing.

The scuttlebutt as to what this is about seems to be gravitating towards a port of Fallout 3 or Fallout 4 to the Nintendo Switch, if not a remaster (and therefore re-sale) of Fallout 3 for modern consoles and computers. Yes, I’m helping perpetuate a train compose of hype, but after Fallout 4, I’m hoping there’s news of something that might repair the damage that did to the RPG side of the franchise.

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May your future make you as happy as this bird.

by Aaron Williams on May 28, 2018 at 11:35 PM
Posted In: Mystery Clip Theater, The Basement Storage Bin

When Cheeto the sun conure gets a hold of a plastic cup, elation ensues:

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The weirdest thing I’ve come across in a long time: Duelin’ Firemen.

by Aaron Williams on May 23, 2018 at 7:27 PM
Posted In: Nostalgia!, The Internetonomicon, Video Gaming

Back in the dark ages of video gaming was an infamous console called the 3DO. It’s probably most famous for the worst Legend of Zelda game ever made, which you can endure clips from here. Most of the 3DO’s catalog featured full-motion video, and the subject of this post is no different in that respect. The fact that this title was completely unhinged and had among its cast Dr. Timothy Leary, however, set it apart. It was never finished, due in no small part for the imagery of a plane and a space shuttle hitting a skyscraper.

Unfortunate references aside, here’s the game’s original trailer (from the time before even 720p was a thing) with extended footage added to produce a seven-minute long “Sundance Trailer” by writer/director, Grady Sain:

I could totally see this project being picked up again for cinematic release by just the right sort of crazy-go-nuts creative filmmaker, but I’m not sure which director I’d give it to for completion. John Waters is no stranger to weird stuff, but I don’t think bluegrass music is his thing. Maybe some intrepid comedy troupe will create an off-off-off-off-Broadway production of it?

Anyway, if that was somehow tantalizing, there was also a 7″ record released to promote the game which can be heard here. Enjoy!

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