Overworld Map For The Game Dragon Half On PC-Engine

It took forever, and isn't perfect (one day I may sit down and remove all the move counters, characters, and such from it), but I put together a full overworld map for the eccentric Dragon Half board game/RPG for PC Engine Super CD.

8-Bit. Twilight. Interactive. RPG. Um, Awesome?

Directed by The Fine Bros. Animation and music by Dr. Octoroc.

Admin Edit: Looks like it got taken down. You can still see parts of it on The Station's Youtube channel, tho.

Spooky. Glitchy.

Besides Julia Segal's absolutely hilarious one, the Tumblr account I check out near-daily is lowmoralfiber, which is maintained by a 20-year old Norwegian noise musician. He seems to share my love of malfunctioning electronics, drone/noise, and early 80s RPG computer games. Enjoy.

Old Thing/Favorite Thing: Let's Play Crystalis

Okay, it's not the funniest Let's Play (which would either be the legendary Oregon Trail, or personal favorite Princess Tomato In The Salad Kingdom). Maybe it's just because I love the game itself so much. Maybe it's because it has 23 chapters. Maybe I'm just thinking too hard about why Let's Play: Crystalis is my new favorite thing ever right at this moment.

Dungeon Master Of The Rings.

DM Of The Rings reimagines the Lord Of The Rings movies, as played by a bunch of role-players that had somehow never heard of the Tolkein series, using stills from the movies. Pretty funny stuff.

TWERPS Manuals In Hungarian.

This is kind of a sequel to my previous article about TWERPS, The World's Easiest Role Playing System. I sent scans of the original manual and the ROBOPUNKS expansion manual to the young parson who commented in that article, and now I have two PDFs of the raw text translated into Hungarian.

Not sure what to do with them, so for now, here they are:

Original Manual (Hungarian)

ROBOPUNKS Manual (Hungarian)

(Keep in mind, none of the charming original illustrations are included in these PDFs, just the raw text translated into Hungarian. I'm under the impression that since it's just a translation and nobody's trying to make any money off this, that it's fair use; but I may be wrong. Not trying to do anything illegal.)

Progress Quest, A No-Player RPG.

How have I never heard of this? Progress Quest is a parody of EverQuest and other early MMORPGs, but technically is the exact opposite. After charachter creation, your charachter ceases to be interactive at all, and simply goes out, kills monsters and advances as you sit back and watch.

A Pretty Decent Circuit's Edge Fansite.

I was having a discussion recently about my favortie cyber-punk novel, which just happens to be When Gravity Fails, by George Alec Effinger.

In 1989, Infocom released an excellent RPG based on the novel, Circuit's Edge. Here's a sparse, but decent fan site that includes a few scans and a couple of walkthroughs.

Incidentally, this is not Effinger's first dealings with Infocom. He actually wrote a short novel serializing the Zork franchise.

Massive Compendium Of Swordquest Goodness.

Here's a great site with all kinds of scans, solutions, and photos of the contest winners.

NSFW: Warcraft Dwarf Player Catches Two Elves Cyber-Sexing In Tram Tunnel.

YAR YAR HUMP HUMP! - an amusing first person account of a Warcrafter catching two other players role-playing humping in the Deeprun Tram. It's NSFW, but it's PG, and pretty damn funny.

Admin Note (05/2010): It appears the original classic tale of "Yar Yar Hump Hump" is no more. Or it's at least stashed away on some WoW forum thread I absolutely do not care enough to chase down. What's that you say? You want a link to a webcomic fanfic of the WoW fanfic? Because you're obviously an incredibly terrible person? Suit yourself.

The Most Intense, Emotionally Draining Boss Battle Evar.

The fight against last boss Giygas in "Earthbound". Not only is he just about the scariest thing ever seen in a Super Nintendo game, with music that sets the mood, but the battle with him is incredibly intense, with the characters calling out through prayer to all of their friends and eventually to the player him/herself to pray for them and their safety.

And the strange dialog Giygas spouts during the battle? It's a reference to a childhood trauma designer Shigesato Itoi experienced as a child, when he went into the wrong theater and saw an exploitation movie called "The Military Policeman And The Dismembered Beauty". The graphic rape scene in the movie horrified him, and the dialog Gigyas speaks is culled from the dialog of that scene.

People swear that as Giygas is dying, he turns into a fetus, which I almost see (keep an eye out around 7:38 in the second video). There's another rumor that there's a voice saying "Let Me Out". I don't really hear it, but keep an ear out at the transitions at 4:38 and 6:53. I think it's just our brains trying to find patterns in the strange sounds.

Well, anyway, that's awesome. Here's that same battle replicated in MUGEN.



And here's Giygas being confronted by Evil Homer.



And here's an excellent 3D rendering of Giygas's lair.

2 Classic NES Games You'd Never Guess Were Sequels.

This is FAXANADU-



If you've never played it before, here's what it's like-



And this is LEGACY OF THE WIZARD-



And this is what this game is like-

Not a whole lot alike between these two games, huh? Well, somehow they are both part of the same series, one that also contains games even less similar, like Legend of Heroes on the Turbografx CD and Sorcerian (one of my personal favorite Adventure/RPG games). I can find almost nothing similar between any of these games; no recurring characters, locations, or even basic mechanics of gameplay.

Anyway, I can't explain it either.

Curses. Foiled Again.

Well, crap. I ranted to literally everybody that would listen that when Apple released the SDK for the iPhone, I wanted to make a port of "Rogue" for the iPhone.

Well, someone else just did.

Gandreas Software just released a very faithful port for the iPhone, with some really innovative extra features, like the ability to pinch/zoom the graphics, switch from ASCII to graphics by tilting the iPhone, and including gesture-based commands as well.

It actually looks pretty cool.

Lord British Is Hanging Out In Outer Space Right Now

When I was 11 years old, Richard Garriott was one of my heroes. Being a kid in the late 80s, I idolized a lot of people (Ronald Reagan, Stephen King, Vanilla Ice, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) that today might seem laughable (actually, Eastman and Laird's TMNT still kinda rocks, so I take that back), but no matter what, my respect for Richard Garriot has NEVER wavered.

He personally created and programmed (I would venture to say) the most innovative, seminal computer RPG since Collossal Cave/Adventure. He then built the success of that game (Ultima) into an amazing Austin-based computer game empire (Origin Systems) that had a good run of nearly dominating the genre. Anyone else ever went to the Origin System's HQ for their Halloween haunted house? If not, you totally missed out.

Anyway, I've idolized this cat for nearly 20 years and he's in space now! How awesome is that!

Rar =)

Masonic History Was Revealed To Me In A Video Game!

It's 1993, and I'm a reasonably normal, if moody, Southern Baptist high school sophmore. I can't remember and can't currently imagine how I wound up playing "Exile" (XZR 2) in Japan on the Sega Genesis. I mean, the basic premise is that you are playing a Muslim during the Crusades! Weren't they supposed to be the "bad guys"?

The game turned out to be an incredibly awesome and innovative side-scrolling RPG-adventure game (my favorite genre of games). It was even cooler when I managed to chase down the Turbografx CD version of the game, with added scenes and less censorship (The main charachter has a cigarette dangling off his lip the whole game! ROXORZ!)

Then I start to learn a little history, and things get weird. Turns out everyone in the game is based on REAL PEOPLE. Roughly.

You play Sadler, who is not only a Muslim mercenary, but an actual Hashishim. You know, the legendary renegade Islamic cult, followers of the Aga Khan sect founded by Hassan I Sabbah, that not only do we get the word "assassin" from, but also where we get the ridiculously innacurate idea that all Muslims believe that dying for Islam will give them a metric ton of virgins to hump.

The fact that Sadler rejected all of that (to the point of killing his leader/father in the previous game, never released in the US or on a system that has existed in 20 years) to become a cynical atheist with a penchant for hallucinogenic drugs (the latter being erased from the American releases as well) makes him, as far as I'm concerned, the coolest video game charachter EVAR.



During the game, you encounter the Templar Knights (as well as their leader Hugh de Payens, another major character), the ghost of Noah, Cathar Monks, Middle Eastern Mystery Cults, renegade Buddhist monk Nichiren... all while chasing this shape-changing MacGuffin called the "Holimax"...

then you are flung back in time to confront Mediterranean Mystery Cults, make allies with Pythagoras himself, and solve the murder of Hiram Abis - leading up to a final showdown in the Garden Of Eden Itself.

In short, twenty tons of historical awesome.

All names in the U.S. release are butchered and distorted, which somehow doesn't surprise me. I still find it hard to believe this game was ever released in the first place.

Strangely enough, though, shortly after this game was released in the US, a sequel emerged. One that inexplicably resurrected popular characters from the previous game, had legendarily bad play control, and dumped all the religious, political, and spiritual themes of it's predecessor.

Sometimes I think that the Illuminati infiltrated the company that released it and indulged themselves in making that sequel that totally took a crap on the previous games. It's the only logical conclusion.

Segagaga - Sega's Quirky Swan Dive Out Of The Console Race.

One of the last titles released by Sega for one of their own systems, "Segagaga" is a truly bizarre, post-modern romp where you are hired to help Sega win the console war.

That's right. In the Sega game you are playing, you are hired by Sega to help them make successful games. Makes your head hurt a little, don't it?

During the course of the game, you run into many, many familiar faces-





And encounter parodies of high-grossing games from the competition-





Haven't had a chance to check it out myself, but it looks like a fun romp as well as an opportunity for Sega to have gone out with a bang (shortly after the release of this game, Sega left the console race to focus primarily on games). However, I think American audiences should feel a little cheated to not have had this opportunity to bid farewell to our old friends.

Good news tho, THIS GUY has been working a translation patch, available for free, and utilizing professional translators.

All you ever wanted to know about Phantasy Star

I've decided today should be Segatastic Saturday! Why? I'm not all that sure. But let's roll with it.

In any case, for my first Segatastic article, I dug up two of the first websites I looked up as soon as the internet was available to me - a pair of excellent and thorough fansites to the seminal Sega "Phantasy Star" RPG series. Amazingly, they're both still around and fairly-regularly updated.

Most of us were exposed to the series because of Phantasy Star 2, one of the first cartridge releases for the Sega Genesis, and likely the first (or one of the first)console RPG many American children of the 80s had ever played - Dragon Warrior was released in the US the same year (1988) and the first Final Fantasy game was released a year later.

The first game was released on the Sega Master System, and is a coveted collectors item. It was known for being one of the first story-based console RPG releases in the United States on any system (1987, a year before Dragon Warrior), as well as being the first with a female protagonist.

The series continued with the epic Phantasy Star III, in which you play through the lives of three generations of characters, and the excellent wrap-up/reboot Phantasy Star IV.

For more (much much more) information, I present to you The Phantasy Star Cave and The Phantasy Star Pages. They contain scans, detailed walkthroughs, maps, fan art/fan fiction... In short, all you ever wanted to know about the series.

Dragon Strike!

So, D & D got upset with HeroQuest's success in the early 90s and responded with their own board game introduction to the D & D world that included a VHS tape video to introduce you to this world.  This guy will explain it to you better than I can!

So you think you're a dork....

Did you ever play HeroQuest?  This was one of my favorite games as a kid.  It was for the dorks who were too dorky to find dorks to play Dungeons and Dragons with them.

Besides, I like Rush. Their music is very complex.

For all of you dorky RPG fans out there!  Don't kill a goblin, listen to Rush!