Giant Fighty Robots

This weekend Rick and I went to Dreamation, a gaming convention in nearby East Brunswick. On Friday we played in a couple of excellent indy RPGs (Primetime Adventures and Mortal Coil). Saturday we met up with a bunch of the excellent nerds of NerdNYC, and in the afternoon we played Mechaton.

Mechaton is a wargame of giant fighting mechs – BUT – everything (the mechs, the scenery, the ruler) is made of Lego! We were lucky enough to get into a game run by Vincent Baker, the creator of the game. (He’s also the man behind the indy RPG Dogs in the Vineyard, which I didn’t find out til later!)

We were joined in the session by Gaming Steve and a young woman whose name I have unfortunately forgotten. When we arrived Vincent had already set up an array of sweet-looking mechs and vehicles, bristling with weapons, for us to choose from. I immediately yelled out “I want that red one with the axe!” I wish I had brought my good camera – the pictures I took don’t do justice to how cool the mechs and scenery looked. Once we had selected our forces, we placed them amid the ruins and got down to the business of smashing each other’s robots to pieces.

Vincent explained the rules as we went along. The first turn was a little bumpy with all the different kinds of dice flying around, but once everything clicked I realized what an excellent system it is.

To summarize, you can have up to 4 attachments on a mech: weapons with various ranges(red dice); movement like wings, jump jets or wheels (green dice); defensive like armor, ECM, or camoflage (blue dice); and communication like radios and spotlights (yellow dice). Every mech also gets 2 white dice which are “wild”. As you take damage, you lose attachments and the dice that go with it. As the mechs get damaged you break the pieces off and scatter them around the battlefield. If you lose your 2 white dice, you are completely destroyed.

The game lasted several hours. It was a blast as we tried to hold our objectives and take each other’s away. The system held up to everything we tried to do (and of course having Vincent there made it a breeze). I just barely squeaked out a victory. I’m really itching to play again so of course the next day I was scurrying to BrickLink looking for the perfect mech-building pieces.

For the full rules, download them from the Mechaton site above, or even better, support indy gaming by buying a printed copy from Indy Press Revolution!

More Battlestar Galactica Legos

Here’s Starbuck and an improved Adama (now with receding hairline!)

Colors are a little funky. I need a full-spectrum lightbulb.

(Lego is its own category now, since I’ve got a ton of stuff in the queue.)

Lego Starbuck Lego Adama (improved)

Battlestar Galactica Legos

I finished my first attempts at Battlestar Galactica Legos this week. (Hmm, maybe Lego needs its own category.) So here is Admiral Adama and Insurgent Tigh.

I’m pretty happy with how they came out except for Adama’s hair. There’s just not too many Lego hair choices. I’m going to try to file it back to make it look more like his hair on the show.

Next up will be Starbuck (in whatever you call that backward t-shirt) and Boomer (in flight suit). I’m having a hard time matching the flight suit color, which is some kind of weird irridescent greeny gray something. I might just go with dark gray.

Lego Adama Lego Tigh

Conjunction of Awesomeness

Circumstances have brought together two things that I really dig: the band Harvey Danger (who I’ve written about before) and Jonathan Coulton, the hilarious genius behind Re: Your Brains and many many other songs.

The Stranger held a charity auction where the winner got to pick a song for Harvey Danger to cover. (Jeez, that was tortured phrasing but you get the message.) The winner selected Coulton’s song Code Monkey. I’m really looking forward to hearing how this turns out!
More details at JonathanCoulton.com.

Write Your Own 360 Games

XNA Game Studio went gold today. This is a set of tools that lets you develop games on your PC and play them (or other people’s games) on your Xbox 360.

The tools are free, but to load the games onto your 360 you need a “Creator’s Club” membership ($99/year).

I’ve been really looking forward to this. I played around with the beta and now the real deal is here.

More details at the XNA Developer Center.

Apocalypto Trailer Subliminal

OK, check out this trailer for Apocalypto.

Now, watch it again. Pause and go frame by frame (arrow keys) right after the guy gets caught in the net. You will see something weird. (If you get to the screaming monkey you’ve gone too far.)

ps: I’m not planning on seeing Apocalypto, but part of me is wondering if this is some kooky marketing scheme to get people to watch the trailer.

Draw a Turkey

Psych Turkey

Found this one via the excellent MAKE blog:

I’m a TA for Psych 1 at Penn. Tasked with photocopying the exam, I took the liberty of appending “Draw a turkey” to the last page …

This flickr photoset shows the results, as well as breaking it down into categories like left-handed, right-handed, with hats, etc.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Legos and LEDs

Zombie Timmy LegoLast week Dan pointed me to an article on EvilMadScientist.com about putting LEDs into Legos.

I don’t know anything at all about electronics but it seemed pretty straightforward so I figured I’d give it a shot.

My first attempt was good old Zombie Timmy. I’ve created him in so many different media at this point it seemed like a natural first try.I picked up some 5mm LEDs at radio shack and used a coin battery like the article said. I was happy to see that there was no resistor necessary.

I sawed his neck off and drilled a hole big enough for the LED. Next I drilled out his eyeballs, and a hole in the back to run the LED’s leads out.

Then I went to work painting up a new Zombie Timmy body. A little blood here, a little dirt there, and I was done. I got a pretty encouraging result – he looks great with his evil, red-glowing eyes! The ring of red around his neck looks a little doofy. That’s the bottom rim of the LED. I will have to watch for that in the next project.
Borg Lego

After that, I figured I would try a Borg. Borg are fun to make because you get to make all these little imaginary circuit diagrams on them.

I followed the same construction technique as with Zombie Timmy, except I only drilled out one of the eyes. I also painted black around the bottom rim of the LED so light doesn’t pour out of his neck.
The only thing I’m not happy with is the way the battery sticks out the back (it’s tucked away behind the figures in both of the photographs here). I picked up a couple battery holders and would like to create a diorama-type setup with the battery holder and possibly a switch behind the wall.

My next project in this vein will be a new version of my Lego Sam Fisher, but this time with gren LED goggles.

Splinter Cell Double Agent

my Lego Sam FisherThe new Splinter Cell game is out, but to cut to the chase: it’s very disappointing. The graphics are great but I’m sort of past being blown away by graphics at this point. I feel like they changed the camera. It seems much closer to Sam and is sort of hard to see what is going on around him. I wonder if they brought the camera in so tight to compensate for the very detailed graphics; this way they don’t have to show as much on the screen at once.

The training levels are freaking terrible (and stolen from Metal Gear Solid) BUT there’s achievements for both so you pretty much will do them anyhow. At one point my screen was literally filled with Sam’s face as he worked his way along a wire – hello crazy camera!

The game starts out like a James Bond movie – you’re in the middle of a mission. When that mission ends, you get the opening. The new moves are cool – I liked pulling a guy down through a hole in the ice.

The story is a bit disjointed at the beginning. I feel like they had 2 competing stories and smashed them together. I don’t want to give anything away (although everyone probably knows it by now) but it just feels like kind of a hack job.

An interesting thing is that they have now put more emphasis on how you finish a level. You get a big scoreboard at the end that gives you your “stealth score”, with subtractions for alarms raised, bodies found, etc. Also, completing optional goals (“Enter base without alerting enemy”, etc) unlocks new gadgets. So you do have some incentive to stay stealthy.

My biggest complaint about the game is the loading times. They’re insane. Just to get from the training levels back to the training level is sooooooo long. The longest on any 360 game I can think of. That’s to load a menu with 2 options on it. I guess it’s because they have all this video and whatnot going on in the background of the menus – I would definitely rather just have the menu load immediately with a static background.

The last straw was arriving at the secret hideout and having to do another training level. I finally threw up my hands and said “This isn’t fun!” Between that and the camera it just wasn’t as good as Splinter Cell games of yore.
I didn’t get around to trying the multiplayer stuff, so no comment on that.

I returned Splinter Cell, and put my credit toward Gears of War, which I hope doesn’t disappoint!