Having had a couple days off, and being at home - I was pleased to have a friend over for lunch today. We had a nice lunch and retired to the ‘office’ for some retro-gaming. I’ve been messing with MacMame and we had a great time playing HyperSports, and trying out some other old favorites. In passing, he mentioned that it was too bad there wasn’t a pro league for gaming, since at one time in his life he wouldv’e loved to give that a go. Well, it looks like there might soon be: if Major League Gaming out of NY has their way.

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I’ve been looking forward to picking up a copy of ‘The Settlers’ and decided to cruise over to Men at Arms Hobbies (Middle Island, NY) with Emily in order to do so. Those of you who knew me ‘way back when’ know that we used to spend a lot of time at Jim’s picking up figures or rule books for the various games we used to play. It was great to hang out with Jim again and talk about some new games.

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I caught an NPR commentary today by Russell Roberts, an economist at George Mason U. Roberts was on about Monopoly being a bad model for the business world in that it portrays capitalism as only a Marxist would see it. He pointed out several of the idiotic assumptions in the game, and mentioned a far better game model in ‘The Settlers of Catan’. In these ‘German-style’ board games, “…players compete, but they also co-operate and trade in various ways…” teaching how to build wealth and success in a more realistic way, with greater emphasis on strategy and negotiation. I had to check it out…

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Instead of reading a story before bed the other night, I decided to intoduce Emily to the game of chess by visiting Chesskids.com online. We ran through some of the ‘classes’ and she didn’t lose interest at all. We’ve spent several nights now learning the pieces and how they move (on the computer) and I’m looking forward to getting out a real board soon. I’ve never been a big chess player, but…(note: a lot of this article is specific to the Mac, but will be similar for all unix-like OSes)

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Wil Wheaton has a great story about how he discovered and fell in love with the classic arcade game Wizard of Wor as a kid on his site today. It refers to a story he had recently written about Wizard of Wor for an online magazine. I try to swing by Wil’s site at least once every couple weeks. We’ve got both of the books Wil’s written since he beamed down from the bridge of the Enterprise D. Both are fairly entertaining - especially the bit in his last book about how he first met “the Shat” (Wil Shatner).
Wil’s books are essentially collections of short stories - rememberances of his life which collectively might have been called ‘memoirs’ in another time. Wil’s just an ordinary guy who ended up in classic movies and popular TV shows. He wasn’t in a war (we both grew up in peacetime), he didn’t end up in government (movies are generally more lucrative anyway), and he hasn’t ended up in jail like so many other child actors. For that alone he should be praised!

Oh, and Wil’s not only a normal human, survivor of Hollywood - he’s a total geek (in the computer user sense) and a raving lunatic liberal (politically speaking)- poke around his site a bit…

Last weekend I hardly moved from the couch. I wasn’t feeling quite well, and Cathy was nice enough to let me lounge around. I ended up spending some of that time gaming (yay!). One of my favorites is an ascii text mode game called T.o.M.E. (Troubles of Middle Earth) and I found out this week that its been expanded to include a multiplayer component. Branded “Tomenet”, its currently only available for windows (boo), and theres only one server of note (in Europe), but being an ascii mode game it hardly matters. The whole thing is reminicent of the original adventure game I used to play in the late 70s.

There are a zillion nethack variants, of which T.o.M.E. is one. T.o.M.E. is actually a direct descendant of Angband which was a nethack variant with a Lord of the Rings bent. Angband (1991) was itself a descendant of Moria (1983) which in turn was a derivative of Rogue (1980). Rogue was written using the ncurses library and used the entire character set and color modes to represent everything in a tiny world including walls and monsters in a dungeon. T.o.M.E. is firmly rooted in the L.o.t.R. genre and really does a nice job of creating a world that isn’t just a bunch of rectangular dungeons.

Bringing T.o.M.E. to the internet is wacky, since nethack and its kin are all “turn based” games. ie: you move, the program moves, you move, the program moves, etc. You can get up from a game of T.o.M.E. at any time and have no fear that the mean nasties are going to obliterate you just because you took your finger off a joypad trigger. Tomenet, however is real time. The first time I saw another character whiz by me I was a little taken aback. You shouldn’t venture in the world of tomenet unless you have the T.o.M.E. keybindings down so you can actually do some stuff.

I’ve been attempting to compile a version of tomenet for OSX from the cvs sources on the site, and have met with limited success. I can build a working executable, and I can log into the game and move around, but the three windows that are supposed to load up with character information don’t come up and I’m unable to buy or sell stuff in the stores. Actually I have spent more time trying to compile the multiplayer game than I have playing it, but thats been fun too.

I grab a few minutes of play time with my T.o.M.E. character whenever I can. Unfortunately, he ran into a “strength trap” recently and this once burly Dwarf can barely get out of his own way with a 15 strength now. I have to try to figure out how to regain his former prowess before I venture into the dungeons again, that’s why these screen shots are from Bree and not someplace more scary…

Download T.o.M.E. (single player) for windows, OSX and a bunch of other OS’s here

You can download the tomenet windows client here

In Bree…

Inventory

Character Stats

This story will seperate the real geeks out there from the wanna-bes. If you know what a LARP is, True Dungeon claims it isn’t one. If you don’t know what a LARP is, you already have a pretty low geek score, and you may wish to skip this story. Apparently Wil Wheaton was playing it at GenCon this past weekend and thought it was a blast. Oh, and if you don’t know what GenCon is, don’t bother to read on.True Dungeon is summed up in the first answer in their FAQ. You can browse the website for more details, but suffice to say it sounds more on par with a D&D based “haunted house” than playing D&D on the holodeck, but it’s definitely worth checking out if you ever get to GenCon. This is just the first year, and they intend to improve the sets as they go on.

“The decision was made early on that since we were given a big enough budget to make an actual walkthrough dungeon, we needed to do as much as we could to immerse the players into our 3D dungeon. We wanted players to experience some of those classic D&D moments that before only their characters got to enjoy. For instance, we thought, what about rogues. Wouldn’t be cool, we asked, if the player with the rogue character actually got to feel what it was like to disarm an actual trap — instead of just rolling a d20? Wouldn’t it be so cool if the rogue got to feel his pulse pound and his palms sweat as he careful manipulated a device with HIS hands — knowing full well that failure to disarm the trap might have a somewhat painful (or shocking) result?

With True Dungeon™, we seek to immerse players within the old-fashion D&D module and let them feel what the stress of combat can do to their coordination, how hard it must be for wizards to remember all those mystical teachings, how difficult it must be for clerics to know all the tenets of their faith, and how invaluable it can be to recall the meaning on an ancient glyph.

True Dungeon’s™ goal is to transport you into another world for a few hours. There you will find out how well YOU stack up against the adventure. You will find out how well you respond to the challenges that are laid before you, while experiencing some of the classic D&D moments from your past.”

Wil Wheaton’s recent experiences (playing a Bard) are recounted on his blog