It's been a long while since I attended a role playing conference, but I have fond memories of GenCon - which is why I find this a bit sad:

SEATTLE (February 15, 2008) Gen Con LLC announced today that it has filed for Chapter 11 protection in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the State of Washington. This action became necessary as a result of significant unforeseen expenses associated with attempts to expand its core business to encompass externally licensed events. Gen Con’s flagship show, Gen Con Indy, remains a vibrant, profitable event. Gen Con Indy will take place as scheduled August 14–17, 2008, in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Supposedly, the show will go on - but bankruptcy is never a good thing.

Technorati Tags: gencon, rpg

Wired reports that another Duk Nukem Forever trailer is out. Wake me when it's for sale...

Wired has a run down of some good games - On the list of ten games, I've played the following:

• Ra: This is a fun game. It's all about bidding, and it moves quickly
• RoboRally - this is a great game, but large boards can take awhile to play. It's can be very funny when people mess up the instructions for their robot :)
• Settlers of Catan - this is a real classic, and no gamer should be without it. A lot of the expansions are fantastic as well.
• Go - I haven't played this one in years, but it's a good - and quite old - game
• Puerto Rico - another absolute classic that no gamer should be without

I can't speak to the other games on the list, but you should definitely own the five above.

Update: Added the link.

Well, this has been an interesting morning. Michael and I decided to try a game of Civ IV, and immediately on connection, we got "Out of Synch" errors. We are both using Windows, so it's not the dreaded Windows to Mac issue. No, it's the recent 313 patch. A quick round with Google turned up this thread, so we turned off random events. That did the trick. So now, I guess we wait for the next patch. Given how quick this one popped up in MP play, I'm surprised it wasn't caught in testing.

Technorati Tags: civ IV, civilization

Via Nick Carr, I see the beginnings of a "Better than Life" (Red Dwarf ref there) interface:

The system consists of a headpiece equipped with electrodes that monitor activity in three areas of the motor cortex (the region of the brain involved in controlling the movement of the arms and legs). An EEG machine reads and graphs the data and relays it to the BCI, where a brain wave analysis algorithm interprets the user’s imagined movements. A keyboard emulator then converts this data into a signal and relays it to Second Life, causing the on-screen avatar to move. In this way, the user can exercise real-time control over the avatar in the 3D virtual world without moving a muscle.

Technorati Tags: second life

Michael tipped me off to this last week - last night he also told me that I had to enable DirectX in the Windows VM. After doing that:

Last week I upgraded Parallels v3.0 to the latest build. For whatever reason I noticed that I could now play Subspace under Parallels where before I couldn't. Puzzled by the sudden new capability - I fired up Civ4 Beyond the Sword to quench my curiosity. To my surprise, it runs!!

I played a game until past my bedtime to prove it to myself last night :)

Technorati Tags: civ iv, parallels, MacBook

We tried a new game this evening: Thebes. The game's theme: you're aspiring archeologists in 1900, ready to go find riches across the ancient world. Before you can do that though, you have the scour the major cities of Europe for whatever information you can find. It looks like this:

There's some luck involved, and it takes only a few minutes to explain - we were done in under 2 hours. Recommended!

For those of us who can't get enough Civ IV, there's the Polycast podcast - which has some great info on the new "Beyond the Sword" expansion. The only down side? Civ IV can definitely cost you sleep :)