We were out at the LI Irish Fest which was held at the Abbess Farm in Calverton from about 2 until 11 on Saturday, and I had been having such a good time I had forgotten to take any pictures at all. All I have are some crappy shots from a cell phone, though I think Sport had a camera with him. There were 7 tents of various sizes, all very impressive. I quipped that we should find out how much it costs to have one of these put up, so we wouldn’t need to set up any tents at all when we camp; We could just partition the huge thing into rooms! In fact, the only thing that wasn’t impressive about the fest was the turn out. I don’t know if it was a lack of advertising or what, but there were some awesome bands playing to nearly empty tents which was a shame. The lack of crowds was very welcome to me personally, however - I just hope they broke even at least. Those tents were probably not cheap.

Finn’s Fury did a bunch of tunes that we play, though they did them in a much more rocking fashion of course, though I missed much of their set as we left to eat some food under another tent that had a couple tables. We could still hear them, but not too well.

We followed Cate over to listen to Stone Cross which is an Irish Influenced folk/Americana duo. We sat in the back while the kids played in the dirt, and doing cat’s cradle games.

Then we watched the Inishfree School of Dance performance which was phenomenal. It was also phenomenally hot so I felt bad for the girls in their heavy dresses - but the tents gave lots of good shade, and luckily there was a lot of wind out on the farm.

My family drifted over to the Tommy Makem tent to take in Makem & Spain Brothers who, with their pedigree would find it difficult to avoid playing that distinctive Clancy Brothers hootin’ and hollarin’ Irish pub music I love so much. They didn’t disappoint, but their tent was nearly empty.

We cut loose from the brothers and headed back to where we saw the dancing in order to catch MacTalla Mor whose pipes we heard calling from across the field. You can’t keep Sport away from pipes, especially when he’s wearing his ‘Sport kilt’. The kids ran all over the dance floor for over an hour having a grand time.

I headed back to catch The Prodigals, a Manhattan band whose members are from Ireland. I’ve gotten more into them lately and really enjoyed their set. This seems not to have been a very popular opinion with most of my friends who mostly abandoned me for the show, though Tim did pop in for a bit at the end.

We cruised around a bit before we ran into 7s and 3s! We checked out their set for a bit, and as usual they were great. I said hi to Jack (the penny accordian player who I think is the band leader). I had met and played with these guys at Barney’s one weekend which was fun (for me). They were all very nice to me, and great musicians. I personally like traditional music though, so I may be a bit biased.

Then we caught Bangers & Mash, and they were a lot better than when Sport, Tim & I first caught them at a bar out in Moriches sans fiddle player a couple years back. I hadn’t seen their singer before either who put on a great show. The kids danced around again for another hour or so and sang a lot of the lyrics to The Night that Paddy Murphy Died which was pretty funny.

All in all, a great time was had. The only change I’d make next time is to force myself to drink a bottle of water in between beers. I was largely unproductive today as a result of the partying.

Many years ago I was probably the only gaming geek on the Island whose mom attended more I-Cons than I did. She would go back when they had Dr. Who guests, but as Dr. Whos popularity faded in the US, she stopped going. Now into it’s 27th year (next weekend - I-Con April 4-6), I-Con is a science fiction convention held on the campus of Stony Brook University. Usually they’ll have somebody from Star Trek or Babylon 5, and lots of sci fi authors and sci-fi film makers, anime artists, sci-fi movies around the clock, science shows, filking, medieval re-enactment fighting exhibitions, and lots of gaming of all kinds. My friends and I would attend mainly for the gaming - non-stop role-playing and board games run by volunteers filling entire lecture halls with long-haired, dice-wielding miscreants. Trek guest is Jeffery Combs (who played, among many more unsung roles in heavy makeup, Weyoun on DS-9). Weekend pass is $55 if you didn’t hook up with a membership long ago. Anyone interested this year?

There was a time in my life when hanging out was synonymous with games. Video games, let alone personal computers were still in their infancy at the time and we had all grown up role-playing, so tabletop games were a natural extension of that interest. It didn’t matter where we ended up hanging out, there was usually some kind of game involved, though the games with all the little chits and cards were only busted out when we weren’t role-playing. There were lots of different classes of games, but a favorite was that of the “beer and pretzel” variety - games that evoked the spirit of role-playing in some way with none of the messy thinking. Games like Wiz-war, Space Hulk, and Talisman were turn-based games were you rolled the die, moved your piece (which was usually a painted model of some kind since you had a ton of them anyway), and worked out your encounters so the next guy could go. Then you were free to grab another beer or go and twiddle with the stereo for a few minutes. Though I can’t say that Talisman ever was a personal favorite, it was good to haul it out of the closet again to recapture that spirit.

For those that haven’t ever played it, think of Talisman as Monopoly with a fantasy theme. There are lots of role-playing elements - each player is a different “character” with different spcial abilities. When you land on a space you may have to “encounter” something and fight it (by rolling a die and adding your character’s ability score and beating the score of your opponent), or otherwise interact by purchasing items or services. As you get more powerful and aquire more items, you decide when to attempt to win the game by moving your piece toward the center of the board, to traverse the especially dangerous squares there and reach the winning square. For all the trappings, it’s still a turn-based board game. You go, they go. There really isn’t much role-playing in it - but once a gamer, always a gamer.

Talisman [wikipedia] was totally new to the girls and they were really excited about it. When I started doing voices and getting into the characters a bit their energy ratcheted up a few notches. My character was the Spy - he’s allowed to see anybody’s spells as soon as they aquire them, so every time somebody drew a new spell card they had to show it to me which gave me an opportunity to snicker a bit and act secretive. I aquired the hag as a follower, and then a poltergeist which slowed me to a crawl till I could rid myself of them at the village. The spy is evil, and the little one wanted her character to be evil like daddy so we let her pick another character - she chose the Necromancer My eldest stuck to her guns to be Good alignment, but couldn’t stay that way! It wasn’t long into the game before she encountered Mephistopheles who promptly turned her evil anyway. Cathy played the swordsman, one of my personal favorites from old times.

I was having a great time, but my youngest is very tiring when she’s excited. The game is a LOT of reading (the cards you draw all have paragraphs to read describing the object or enemy and the board itself has lots of things you need to read as well), so she couldn’t play by herself and she’s only now getting to point where she can sit still and let other people take their turns without grabbing for the dice or whining about it. But we managed to get around the board more than a few times, aquire several objects, almost die in nasty encounters with a dragon, a giant, and a Craft 10 demon before we finally had to wrap things up for bedtime.

So tonight I was transported back almost 18 years to those simpler days when all we had to worry about was whether we had enough money for gas to get to the game *and* buy beer on the way.

[update: well, I guess I still worry about that - it's just not my *only* worry anymore!]

Sundog is by far one of my most favorite games from the 1980s. Originally written for the Apple II in 1984 by Wayne Holder and Bruce Webster and released by FTL games (founded by Wayne Holder in 1982), I didn’t play it until version 3.0 was released as a port to the Atari ST in 1985. Sundog was just one of the successes of FTL. Any gamer awake around that time would recognize that other big FTL hit game series, Dungeon Master.
Thankfully, I can still play Sundog on my Mac using NoSTalgia 1.42. This emulator hasn’t been updated in several years, but it works well. Of course, you’ll need the game ROM to play the game as well. note: I have it on good authority you’ll find it on Automation Experts 116.

The original intent behind this post was to write up a history of the game and review the gameplay a bit, until I discovered this has already been done by Maury Markowitz, and quite well in my opinion. Ian Hadfield’s Sundog Information Page has loads of information about the various cities, planets, and commodity exchanges in Sundog.

The 20 sided die evokes memories of all night Dungeons and Dragons gaming sessions. I never imagined them being rolled in ancient Rome! Gaming blogs were all over this story when it first broke in 2003 when Christies announced it was auctioning off a Roman 20 sided die. I guess I just don’t run in the crowd of folks that can afford to plunk down $18,000 for such a bauble, but I have to admit that it’s intriguing. Measuring 2 and 1/16 inch wide and covered in arcane symbols, Christies claimed the deep blue-green glass piece was made sometime around the 2nd century AD. The die was supposed to have been found in Egypt in the 1920s by the father of the seller. Most of the blogs I have found have the same information, all gleaned from the Christie’s website lot info (no longer on the web), and all mentioned that ’several polyhedra with similar symbols are known from the Roman period’, but I can’t find anything (quickly) to support this statement (yet?). The fact that a University professor in Maryland paid the aforementioned exorbitant sum for the die at auction does not provide enough evidence for me that it’s not just an early 20th century oddity passed off as an ancient die. If anyone has any information about other polyhedra of this type, or can point to a scholarly study of the piece in question, please let us know!

My plant closes down for the holidays every year, and although there are many more productive things I might be doing during my time off, I usually end up spending much of the time hunched over my laptop either working on my websites or figuring out how to get obscure games running on the various flavors of operating systems I use. I’ve managed to squeeze a goodly amount of both pastimes in over this year’s break. I’ll let the site updates speak for themselves (check ‘em out!) and spend more time talking about the games I played.

Seth and I were able to grab a little time to play some online games just before Christmas, and though I lost both - I had a good time. Since Seth wasn’t able to get over to play in person and only very recently got his new PC up and going, we needed something that would be easy to set up. I’ve had both of these games up my sleeve for some time, and it was good to actually play against somebody I know for once.

Tactics Arena Online - a “battle chess” type game (remember Archon?). Turn based, you go then they go. This game requires flash and is played in a browser. I goofed and didn’t take a screen shot of our games, but I found this image on a review of the game (along with a couple other screenshots here in case you’re interested in a more thorough and objective discussion of the gameplay. My opinion is that the game is great, but suffers from the fact that the game has a for-profit model which means if you pay a monthly fee, you have access to more powerful playing pieces. I’ve never liked games like that (including many collectible card games like magic the gathering). Other than that, games are just about the right length (for my short attention span) and interesting to watch (I’m a sucker for miniatures). My only real beef is there doesn’t seem to be a way to just view games in progress (which is a good way to learn), maybe I missed it?
To play, just log on to:
http://www.tacticsarena.com/play/
Pick a nickname and a password and you’re in. Good times.

jSettlers - We also played a game of this Settlers of Catan clone mostly because we didn’t need to install anything to play (assuming Java is already installed). It’s another browser game, so all you really need is a java-enabled web browser (and an internet connection :), but offers AI (robots) to play against if you don’t have any human buddies interested and don’t want to play against someone you don’t know. You can get into live games with other folks through the chat room, though I haven’t done that. There’s an image of how our game ended attached to this post.

Yes, I am aware of the Xbox 360 version of Settlers! I don’t own an Xbox 360 though

jSettlers is based on Settlers of Catan, a turn based board game very popular in Europe where you have to build roads and settlements and get resources based on where your buildings are. To build you need various amounts of the different resources some of which you won’t have so you are forced to trade with the people you are playing against to get anything done.
To try out jSettlers, just click:
http://jsettlers.org/
Enter a nickname, pick a game (or type something into “New Game:”, and click ‘Join Game’. This should open a new window where you can pick a place to “sit”.

Pioneers - Although I like jSettlers, I’ve been playing Pioneers more lately, and I spent some time getting the latest version (11.3) to work on the Mac and the Ubunutu box the kids use so we could play against each other easily. Pioneers is a lot like jSettlers, but offers a choice of board themes, different board layouts, and a non-java interface (Although I like the fact that it runs everywhere easily, I find most Java apps clunky and slow, but just my opinion - please don’t flame me). Once I gave up on compiling Pioneers for the Mac (the GTK+ dependencies completely stumped me) and went with the fink install, I was able to play, but now I have 1.2G of GTK crap in my /sw directory that I don’t need! It’s worth it to play pioneers though

WizWar - last, but certainly not least! I’ve written about Wizwar here before. I was able to mess around with Wizwar some, but only got one complete game in. I started out my holiday looking for an online substitute for this, one of my favorite board games of all time. Here’s a shot of me and the kids starting out a game. I love board games (check out boardgamegeek.com if you do too), but I find that I don’t have time to set up my favorite games *and* play them anymore! That’s the main reason I’ve been seeking out computer versions of them I think.

Here’s the story: There’s an unofficial home for Wizwar at http://wizwar.com/. The author of the game, Tom Jolly, swings in once in a while to comment, but it’s not his site. The guys that run it do it out of love for the game (I still cherish my 5th edition version I got sometime around 1990). Searching the forums of that site brought me to some posts of long ago by someone nicknamed Synneth who started writing a computer version of Wizwar a few years ago (as a teenager). He had gotten it very far so that it was playable, but on Windows only, and due to some (seemingly endlessly upcoming) plans the author had/has to release a computer version, he couldn’t post it on Wizwar.com. He was nice enough to post it on his own site so I could grab a copy - here’s the forum thread, but since it’s only a Windows program, I haven’t messed with it too much. I have been meaning to get back to it and actually play a full game, but haven’t had access to a Windows machine for long enough (yet).

By the programmer’s own admission he made a bit of a mess of the code (which was originally going to be open sourced, but then got into a deal with Tom Jolly, and then abandoned it) and was only really learning to program when he originally wrote this game, but it mostly works and shows how much fun a computer version of Wizwar could be. I have had a couple lock-ups necessitating a CTL-ALT-DELETE, and I’d really like to see a more detailed log history since the computer players wiz by (pun intended) and by the time you go again you’ve missed important stuff. Also, something messed up once on a destroy wall spell and it didn’t work. But here’s a couple screenshots anyway to whet your appetite for *more wizwar*!

Perhaps it’s because I’m getting old, or because I stare at a computer screen all day but I just can’t play modern computer games. At least not for a very long time at a stretch, and certainly not for long enough to learn how to play one of the several big multiplayer games that seem to have sucked in all of my friends. I am drawn to the games I enjoyed in my youth, games that are graphically simple, emulated or otherwise. Nethack is one of those great games that just sucks you in and makes you want to play it, and since it is a turn based adventure game, you can play at your own pace and save at any moment and walk away from it whenever you wish to return to the exact point you were at when you left.

Even cooler than that, Nethack is open source and free, runs on practically every machine ever made and if you don’t want to bother installing it, you can just telnet into a game (in Windows from the command line Start | Run | cmd, or Mac from the Terminal app in Applications | Utilities) by typing telnet nethack.alt.org for almost the exact same experience.

In the telnet game, type r to register a login name and set a password, enter an email address so they know who you are. Next time you play just type l to login and you’ll be right where you left off (if you save your game by typing shift-S to save before you leave of course!) Then you can configure your settings by pressing o - this might baffle folks unfamiliar with Vim, just type :q! to exit the editor. You can watch other people playing by typing w, or play yourself by hitting p. Stuck, don’t know how to move? Just type ? and then b to get some help. Nethack is not simple, it is a huge and complex and hack and slash adventure game that is nearly impossible to beat. There is almost endless variability in levels and play style. It’s filled with quirky humor, and though it is a graphically low-fi experience, you can still get chills when a new monster pops out of the darkness, you’re poisoned and you have no cure poison vials left and you’re down to 2 hit points and you have to plan your next move. Get sucked into Nethack right now!

The Official Nethack Guidebook
http://www.nethack.org/v343/Guidebook.html

The Nethack Beginners guide
http://www.melankolia.net/nethack/nethack.guide.html

Wikihack
http://nethack.wikia.com