It’s hard to believe it’s been a week already, but I’ve finally caught up on the sleep I missed from the awesome time Musashi and I had at GenCon 2008. As our esteemed editor in chief mentioned, we were joined by occasional contributor Centurion and his charming significant other Lindsey for a weekend of gaming, carousing and scoping out the newest developments in all kinds of games. We were joined by a record 28,600 unique and over 95,800 turnstile attendees.

This year, your humble staff indulged in gaming to an unprecedented degree. We started Thursday night with a modern-world-setting round of Call of Cthulhu. CoC is one of my all-time favorite RPGs, and it was a pleasure once again to experience the atmosphere of dread the game creates, especially since Musashi and I were denied in our attempts to join a session last year.

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I tried to post this via YouTube, but they claimed there was some sort of ‘Terms of Use Violation’, never mind that the other two I posted are seemingly okay. Plus, it was a public event and there were no Non Disclosure Agreements being passed around, so screw it. Enjoy! This was ripped straight from my DVD Handicam so the quality is a bit better than the other two videos (which were taken with my digital camera).

If you missed the other parts of the demo video, you can find them here - the other two parts bookend the video here, so if you want to know what’s behind that door, here you go…

UPDATE: Here’s a version hosted at 1UP…I did the math on the filesize and realized a mere 1000 downloads would kill our month’s bandwidth.

I’m knee-deep in uploading media to Flickr and YouTube from this week’s Gathering ‘o Geeks, Gen Con Indy, and thought I’d sum up the high points of the convention. Before I get started, though, I should mention that most of the (presentable) photos I took this weekend are now available for your perusal at our Flickr stream. I can’t guarantee satisfaction, even of the vicarious sort, but there should be something in there for everyone (except, perhaps, David Hasselhoff fans). Enjoy.

That said, here’s what I did on my summer vacation:

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Okay - I know, we didn’t do any posting this weekend. Gen Con kept us busier than usual this year, and - aw, screw it. I’ll tell you what really happened. I was up Friday and Saturday nights until 4am and on Sunday from 10am to 2 pm playing Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition with Mazinga and some friends I hadn’t seen in a while (verdict: I’m in love - you nay-sayers can keep your first/second/third/whatever editions…I’m on board with 4E). Needless to say, my body is seriously telling me to go fuck myself right now, and I’m considering an energy-drink IV drip to keep me awake today.

That said, I did manage to snag some video and pictures which I’ll post today and tomorrow, and a full convention wrap-up will follow.

Below are two videos of BioWare’s upcoming RPG Dragon Age: Origins and a few minutes of the live-action HeroClix demo from Wiz Kids’ booth on Saturday afternoon.

I FINALLY got AoC loaded and running last night after fucking around with it for most of the evening. Rolled Brimmstone, Cimmerian Conqueror on Omm. I had thought about running a Dark Templar dedicated to the snake god, Set, but I don’t want to deal with the ERP implications of that just yet. I had to turn the graphics way down to play, but it is still enjoyable. It is a whole different look than WoW, but once they support DirectX10 fully and when/if I upgrade my video card, I can see where it would look incredible. I also had to turn off shadows at my level of settings because they were projecting out from NPCs like 15 feet in various directions, which creeped me right the hell out. Character creation was simple, yet you can really fine tune a lot of things. I’m told that female chatacters even have a breast slider, much to the delight of boys/men everywhere who have no idea what real tits look and feel like from personal experience. I myself had a slider for “Posterior”, so I cranked that bitch up to give the ladies something to look at. Old Brimm is sporting scars from a bear on his chest, which is an international symbol for “Don’t fuck with me, cause I’ve seen some shit”, and my eyeline is blacked out like when Conan and company snuck into Thulsa Doom’s palace in the movie. Hairstyles varied between “Fantasy Mullet” and “Lead Singer of an Emo Band”, but I managed to find one that matched my savage spirit! I found a beard I like too, so pretty much I look like a really buffed up and pissed off Jesus. I’ll turn your other cheek, with my fists! This whole look is complemented by the fact that the start of the game should be called Age of Loincloths. I’ve looted like 5 different styles of loincloths so far from my enemies, which not only begs the question “WTF is up with all these loincloths?” but also “Why the hell am I killing people and trying on their underwear?!”. Finally I settled one one made from alligator skin, as it had the perfect combination of raw sex appeal and a hint of danger.

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Back when I was a news editor over at PlanetPS2, I floated an idea for an article comparing and contrasting the differences between Eastern (read: Japanese) RPG’s and Western RPG’s. The senior editor never picked up on it, but I still think it’s a contrast well-worth considering, especially with the volume of Western-crafted console and computer Role Playing Games.

One game franchise I never hear mentioned in the same sentence as RPG, however, is Grand Theft Auto. And…I wonder why? I’m sure the implied geekiness of the term is partially responsible (after all, GTA unrepentantly appeals to the lowest common denomimator of the gaming crowd, even as it satirizes it).For all of it’s other virtues (and they are many), the Grand Theft Auto series, especially after the move to its’ current open-world model, is in many ways more of a pure role-playing experience than many other well-known RPG’s. And Grand Theft Auto IV, released yesterday, reinforces this notion.

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