Up late talking games & writing? You're...

First up, a quick link that I got from Bill Harris' Dubious Quality blog (the link is to your left.)

A Day in the Life of a Turret

This clip will be more meaningful if you've already played Portal, but it's funny as hell either way. Kudos to the guys who put that one together.

Games
Started up Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles with the wife today, and she's a pretty good shot. The game is much more difficult than I had anticipated, but it's still quite do-able with two and it's a hoot to go back and revisit some of the classic RE bits... Basically Capcom repurposed a lot of old cutscenes and reworked older game content to create an on-rails shooter similar to a House of the Dead and the like. Not sure I'd buy it full price, but we're enjoying it as a rental. My thumb gets pretty tired hammering on the Wiimote's 'A' button, though.

Writing
I've basically got the outline for Untitled Book Two in my series sketched out, and I'll be starting the actual writing pretty soon. My hope is that the process will go faster since I've already established a lot of things and I'm not starting completely from scratch, but we'll see.

Tabletop
My recent obsession, HeroScape, just announced that it's been sold to Wizards of the Coast, a local (as in, Washington-based) gaming company that's taken the not-videogame-games world by storm over the last fifteen years or so. They started with Magic: the Gathering and exploded due to its incredible popularity. They eventually bought Dungeons & Dragons (if that gives you any idea of how big they are in the games world) among other properties, and now they're bringing HeroScape into their all-encompassing arms.

A rep from WoTC has been taking comments from players over at the HeroScapers Forum which I think is an excellent idea, and hopefully they'll be able to grow the game into something a little more accessible and successful. For some strange reason, Hasbro had been aiming the game at the 8-12 year-old bracket (which is WAY too low) and shipping it to toy stores when they should have been shooting for the older disposable-income gamer and stocking a wider variety of outlets.

Picking up some of the older pieces on eBay has been a minor nightmare and future releases had been thrown into question, but the WoTC reps are hearing the feedback from players and with their unsurpassed games know-how, I'm sure it's nowhere but up from here.