This is a lengthy full-play demo of Subversion, which is probably the most exciting video game release of the next year:
World of Love 2010: Chris Delay from Mudlark on Vimeo.
I also recommend checking out the Subversion Design Diaries at Introversion’s website.
And if you haven’t played their first game — Uplink: Trust is a Weakness — then you’ve been missing out on the best hacking game ever made.
The spam filter on the new site keeps catching various spammers all using the same scripts. This one, attached to dozen different posts over the past week, keeps catching my eye:
Love to read such things, they always interest me and usually I have a question: why?
Why, indeed.
Every time I read it, it passes me into a little state of self-reflection, which is intriguingly shaped by the random post to which the spammer has attached it.
The Super PSTW Adventure RPG succeeds at being both fun and funny while simultaneously delivering a completely devastating critique of modern video games. It also doesn’t overstay its welcome, taking only a few minutes to play.
Obstacles in roleplaying games do not exist in order to prevent a PC from doing something. They exist in order to challenge the players to come up with an interesting way of doing it.
(This thought occurred to me as I was reading Flawless by Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell in which they describe a diamond heist in ’76 in which the thieves tunneled into the vault from the sewer. They tested for the presence of a seismic alarm using an alarm clock and hauled away the excavated dirt in a Landrover they drove through the sewer tunnels. Then they welded the vault door shut from the inside and threw a Bastille Day looting party. That vault door didn’t exist to protect the jewels. It existed to make those thieves look cool.)
(Not to be confused with Alejandro.)
Alejandra: If you are still reading my blog, please call or e-mail me. None of the contact info I have for you is working any more, so I’m throwing this out into the cold void of the ‘net in the hope that you’ll see it.
Everybody else should feel free to ignore this. Or make Lady Gaga jokes in the comments. Whatever works for you.
