To Live and Die in Dungeons &amp; Dragons
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Gamers reveal their fantasy versions of Dungeons &amp; Dragons in a lively online discussion. How characters die, and whether they can be resurrected, is a favorite topic.
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A survival guide for Boomers disrupted by death, divorce or financial difficulty.
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By Robert Jones Parry  More and more com
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Rip up those obituaries. The club you thought had passed away still has more than enough life left in it. Enough to beat the champions.
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Arianne is a multiplayer online engine to develop turn based and real time games providing a simple way of creating the game server rules and clients like Stendhal. Marauroa, our server, uses Java and MySQL for hosting dozens of players on a solo host.   Mr and Mrs Yeti have a sweet little ice cave below Semos Mountain. Be like Mr Yeti, keep your loved one sweet, with a red rose from Fleur in Kirdneh. While you're there, why not visit the museum, drink in the inn, go to the bank or even buy a house!  Perhaps your loved one likes cute cuddly animals? Then take a stroll around the farm east of Semos. It's full of cute piglets, goats, cows and little tiny mice.  Alone for Valentines? Go kill some dwarves! That'll help! The orcs in ados abandoned keep want to be rid of the mountain dwarves, so you'd even be doing them a favour. Perhaps retail therapy is what you need, in which case the Orcs in the keep can sell you good quality armor. Some say there's even better stuff deeper in the keep.  Enough of the blood and guts and back to a love story. Princess Esclara on Amazon island has locked up an ugly barbarian - and he wants to know why! She's not too happy either - are there secret feelings between them? Ok, so it's not quite Romeo and Juliet...  Lastly on the love theme, a gentle reminder that we want to help any new people who join our world. Hayunn Naratha has been employed as full time tutor of anyone new, which should help a lot, but remember if you do see anyone looking lost - help them! It's what makes the world go round.
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A hard-boiled detective thriller for the Nintendo DS convincingly blurs the boundaries between reading and playing. Commentary by Clive Thompson.
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Tycho:  I watched this video myself on Friday, and then watched it again, and then watched it a third time when Khoo came in - providing commentary throughout, which I'm almost certain was unwelcome.  I urge you not to watch the embedded, nasty  version over at GameVideos, but to take advantage of their "Download" or "Watch Larger Version" options.  This way, you can obsess as I have - pausing on each screen of the character generator or battle interface, drinking deep of their  forbidden texts.  (CW)TB
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Tycho:  Having played collectible card games since the original printing of Magic - taking my dishwasher's tips across the street to Dragon Tails to secure boosters for the coveted Arabian Nights - seeing Gabriel take up the pastime has warmed (but not thawed) my black heart.  It's always a portion of myself I've bridled in his presence, kept hidden, suppressed may be the word.  To have him take it up so freely makes me wonder which perversion of mine he'll take up next.    When he started talking about his "Firestarter" deck, whose dancing fires were stoked by a mysterious device known as "The Holon Engine," I began to worry.  The dangers of Netdecking are fairly substantial when it comes to friendly play, a corrosive force that turns friendly pick-up games into ostentatious displays of wealth on par with rap videos.  If you're playing in a competitive venue, building on prior art and making loads of precision purchases is probably your only recourse.  But if you're just playing at lunch, let me be clear:  you are consorting with devils.    I took time over the weekend to hit the level cap in Call of Duty 4, and then just to be sure that I understood what was going on I played for several more hours.  I'm not the most skilled player you will encounter, with a roughly equal number of kills and deaths, but I prefer to think of my work in an assassinative context - the removal of key players at key moments.  Please let me have this.  In the absence of the game's deeply integrated progression scheme, Infinity Ward would merely have created one of the best shooters available today.  It would have staunch proponents, and they would be right to praise it.  Is there a substance within cream that can rise to the top of itself?  This substance has been discovered.  As a distillation of the Infantry FPS, this is right down to it.  This is brutal, unrepentant, bathtub fucking hooch.  It is tight and smooth, it is lethal.  Unrelenting in its intensity, your first rounds - indeed, your first few levels - will be spent without the succor of CoD4's rich rewards for continued play.  But you'll see them on the killcam, every time you go down:  this one has increased health, of course that would help.  This one does more damage.  This one, after he's killed, pulls his sidearm and takes a few final shots.  This one's shots retain more of their damage after they pass through a wall.        You earn these for leveling up, with the experience you gain for every kill, for every round.  You also earn experience for Challenges, which are (collectively) "awesome things that you did."  I completed X-Ray challenges last night for killing people behind walls, which dished up bonus XP - this is displayed with exultant audio and video cues at the very moment of success.  Killing while crouched, killing while prone, taking down an enemy helicopter, this is all gravy.  There are challenges specific to your weapon, as well:  for kills and headshots with that firearm, you travel down an upgrade path unique to that weapon that reveals sights, camouflage patterns, and other tools to customize your equipment.    Watching videos of multiplayer play online, you'll get the impression that it looks better than it does.  It looks fantastic, don't get me wrong, but it's not completely photorealistic.  What it does have is an extremely reliable framerate and excellent level design, so that during the experience of play these fantastic visuals are transmuted into something sublime.  Here's what I mean:  if a friend is over, and they are watching you play, they'll be able to detect flaws here and there.  Level geometry isn't especially fanciful, and blown paper or leaves look a little strange.  But for the player, movement is just right, player models are just right, and the environments are right so that moment to moment everything gels.      As I said on Friday, to bring this thing into the house of Halo is pretty ballsy - but it'll carve out its proper due.  On the Playstation 3, what force could stand against it?  I have a high opinion of Haze, but I've never played it - that's based mostly on my gut.  Call of Duty 4 will fall hard on that system, like shrieking artillery.
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Tycho:  Gabe keeps coming into the Goddamn office with his Goddamn tales of high adventure, telling me about how there's tokens or some shit in Burning Crusade now, or maybe tiers, and other words I had scoured from my consciousness.  He also says there is hot new five-man content, which initially sounded like pornography.  The comic is correct - I purchased it in a moment of weakness.  As I must often approach you, the cherished reader, to apologize for this or that indiscretion, it may be more appropriate to say that I have moments of strength which are suspended in cowardice and moral decay.
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Tycho:  When I started reading articles about Senator Brownback's bill - the one that would require that the ESRB play through games in their entirety - I expected to agree with it in principle, but take issue with its execution.  The shrill phase of the site, where I would don armor and ride under the aegis of the true gamer no matter how mild the incentive, now rests in the reliquary with Xbox Controller Jokes and Jabs At User Friendly.  I had chosen a singularly poor moment to become reasonable.  Upon further examination, the Senator's plan (which I think may be rightly called a machination) is the sort of thing one might forge in the fires of Mount Doom.
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The Lab judging panel will be busy this weekend picking a winner in the speak-to-the-Prime-Designer contest. (You can still enter today.) As they toil tirelessly, let us ponder this designerâs ethics, and whether it&#8217;s better to live in simulated joy or be really miserable. The posthuman Prime Designer may not care much what our puny [...].
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There is a part of gamer psychology that is rarely discussed, but incredibly important: We are thrilled by wanton destruction. We need it like a form of food. Commentary by Clive Thompson.
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Researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health use a video game to help determine the link between the hippocampus and depression. In Game|Life.
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If there&#39;s ever a book called How to Write a Bad Movie, here are a couple of rules that must make the list: 1. In any given life-or-death situation with several possible courses of action, the protagonist must always pick the one least likely to be chosen
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Tycho: I just read through one of the conduits of Leipzig gaming news, and was jolted by a piece of news: Xbox Live is going to be moving into classic board games. I don't mean, like, Chutes and Ladders or some shit - though I don't doubt that GrowPot420 would snap that up on day one. No, I mean like Settlers of Catan and Carcassone. Pillars of the tabletop gaming community, so to speak. This is probably the biggest news of that convention for me. Getting people together to play these games, or finding people to play them with at all can be a trying endeavor. This is near Goddamn optimal.(CW)TB
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Suppose a person of reasonable mental competence decides, after carefully weighing the available options and consulting with those around him, that life is no longer worth living.  Should that person have the legal right to end their own life?  Suicide (and assisting suicide) is presently illegal in most western nations, a fact which only serves to make it slightly difficult for suicidal people to carry out their wish.  I propose a different approach - in fact, an opposite approach.  I propose that anyone who honestly wishes to terminate their own life should be provided with the means to do so humanely, reminiscent of (though perhaps more gentle than) the infamous suicide booths popularized by Futurama.
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Gamers stuck in the United States have had little chance of going pro. Until now. By Bruce Gain.