• Kerbal Space Program – First Orbital Mission

    A quick guide to making your first orbital flight in Kerbal Space Program

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  • Review – Euro Truck Simulator 2

    Random thoughts on the game Euro Truck Simulator 2

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  • After Action Report – Eclipse Phase: A Tale of the Fall

    A group of Eclipse Phase players find themselves in the city of Atlanta as the Fall occurs around them. Will they be one of the few who escape, or will they find themselves one of those who were lost?

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  • The Secret World – All Faction Recruitments

    This is a complete compilation of the recruitment and introductory cinematics for all three of the factions of The Secret World as of the final Beta weekend. The Templar, Illuminati and Dragon recruitments, how they introduce themselves, how they send you to the “Tokyo Flashback”, their weapons trainers, your meeting with their leaders where they send you on your first assignment to Solomon Island, your first arrival in Agartha, the Hollow Earth, and your welcome and first mission in Kingsmouth. Every introduction, all in one place. Enjoy.

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  • The Secret World – It’s an Adventure!

    The latest beta weekend for The Secret World has just ended and while I’m still quite excited for the game I’m starting to have some worries as well. Specifically, while the game is close to what I’ve been looking for I’m not sure that most people playing are looking for the same thing I am. The Secret World is a game based on exploration, investigation and discovery. Yes, there are combat missions. Yes, there are missions where you have to “go to location x and kill y of critter z”. But the main story missions require thought and investigation. Based on what I saw rolling past in the chat window, I’m not sure most players realize that. I easily saw hundreds of requests for “What is the solution to (some mission)?” It isn’t clear if the players in question had tried to solve it on their own and failed, but a number of them were rejecting hints and demanding the solution. They are trying to power through the content just to get their characters leveled up. They’re looking for end-game content. The problem is that in this game the game isn’t about the end-game. As the cliché says; it’s about the journey, not the destination. The beauty of the investigation missions is that the solutions to them aren’t in the game! You have to do real research yourself to solve them. While some players will welcome this challenge I think it is frustrating a far greater number. This isn’t an

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  • After Action Report – Cthulhu: Now – Light of Darkness (Part 2)

    The players move around a bit and see that the light is now moving away from them along the fence line. They take the opportunity to go back inside the building. The hallway is now empty and they continue on down it. They find another lab and quickly search it, finding nothing. The next door is locked. Surprsingly, no one has Locksmith and they can’t open it. They discuss breaking it down but someone thinks to check the receptionist’s desk in the lobby and find a set of keys in a drawer, one of which opens the door. Inside they find another body, another student identified by her id as Alicia Fowler. She has a box of candles and matches and a spiral notebook lies beside her. Most of the notebook contains lecture and lab notes but the last page shows the following. Dawson wants to “investigate the scene” and makes a Spot Hidden. He finds a waxy, scorched spot near the body which could have come from a candle burning down. The Keeper also points out that the storage room was locked from the inside. After asking about timing the players realize that the candle shouldn’t have burned completely down in the time since their cars stopped and figure things started going wrong at the facility much earlier. They decide to go see if they can find out what happened to Gabe. The southern part of the area is a relatively recently plowed field. Dawson and Neyland are able

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  • After Action Report – Cthulhu: Now – Light of Darkness (Part 1)

    This was a group of players who (with one exception) had never played Call of Cthulhu before and in fact had only started role-playing in the past few months (Pathfinder, which had been run by the one experienced player). They had played Arkham Horror and so had at least a grasp of the general concept but that was it. With the one exception I don’t think any of them had even read Lovecraft. I had planned to run Crack’d and Crook’d Manse from Mansions of Madness but the group suddenly decided they wanted to run a modern-day campaign. Literally the only modern thing I had with me that the experienced player hadn’t played was a tournament scenario I had run a couple of years previously. I didn’t consider it to be a good introduction to the game but, despite being warned of that, they decided they wanted to go for it. And so, a playthru of… Light of Darkness A Scenario for Cthulhu: Now Introduction: It is late at night. A group of travellers are proceeding north on I-95 from Jacksonville to Savannah and passing through southern Georgia when they encounter a detour. Road construction. They need to detour along a back road for about 25 miles before it intersects the Interstate again. They quickly leave the Interstate behind and find themselves driving through dark, empty countryside; alternating pine forests and stretches of swamp (the Okefenokee swamp occupies this part of Georgia) with an occasional abandoned and overgrown farmhouse. The

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  • Welcome to The Secret World

    For the past few weekends I’ve been playing in the open beta for The Secret World, a new MMO coming out in a month or so from FunCom. The Secret World is different from most MMOs we have seen so far. It isn’t set in some fantasy world or on a distant planet. Instead, it is set here on Earth in the present day. But this is not the Earth most of us are familiar with. This is a world of secrets that have been hidden from the general population. A world of vast conspiracies and creeping evil. A secret world in which all of the myths and legends, all of the stories and tales you hear, everything is true. You become involved in The Secret World when you swallow a bee. No, really. The bees are representations of Gaia and they are returning because “dark days are coming”. They are finding individuals that they can imbue with “anima”, magical energy, that those individuals can then use to fight the growing darkness. You are one of the individuals that have been chosen. But you have no sooner become aware of and begun to control your newfound powers when you are contacted by one of the three organizations which secretly rule the world. The Templar, The Illuminati and The Dragon have been struggling behind the scenes for control of the Earth for centuries but now the “Filth”, an evil from beyond the world as we know it, has broken through. The

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  • Fallen London – Walking the Polythreme Streets

    After being away for about six months I have returned to Fallen London. Actually, I can’t say I’m in Fallen London. I’ve taken my Zee Clipper across the Underzee and have made my way to the city of Polythreme, the home of the Clay Men. I’ve been wandering the streets here while trying to make sense of the strange place in which I find myself. A place almost as strange as Fallen London has become. As you may have noticed I played quite a bit of Echo Bazaar (as they called it at the time) last year. I managed to hit the level cap in most of my attributes and had managed to complete most of the storylines. There were a few outstanding, but breeding a beast in the Labyrinth of Tigers or getting further involved in the machinations of Mahogany Hall didn’t interest me that much and the storylines I was still interested in seemed to have stalled. So I left the game for a while, waiting for it to advance. Then a couple of weeks ago I saw in passing that things had been updated and so logged back in to see what was up. And things had changed, but some of them in ways to make clear that you can’t always go home again. The game is now called Fallen London instead of Echo Bazaar. The developer’s explanation is that everyone called it Fallen London anyway, but I find it a less interesting name. Hearing someone talk

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  • The More Things (Don’t) Change…

    I had finished Skyrim for the third time and was trying to figure out what to do next. I thought about loading up a bunch of mods and starting a fourth playthrough, maybe taking the Nords side in the Civil War this time, then I thought maybe I would play through Morrowind and Oblivion again first. And that made me start thinking about how much things have or haven’t changed from those games. Now I’m not talking about the game systems themselves. Obviously the graphics are better, the gameplay has been streamlined and the user interface is improved. I’m talking about the game world itself. In Skyrim it has been over 200 years since Martin Septim sacrificed himself at the end of Oblivion but things in Tamriel are remarkably the same. Yes, parts of the Empire have fallen away. Yes, there was a war with the Aldmeri Dominion and the Altmer are now the enemies of the Cyrodillic Empire. But, overall, the world is pretty much the same as it was. You would have thought that something would have changed beyond a few broad strokes of politics, but that seems to be all there is. As someone living in the early 21st century we are used to the relentless advance of progress. Science, technology, society… all these things have improved or otherwise changed even in our lifetimes. The idea of complete stagnation, which seems to be what is happening in Tamriel, seems out-of-place. True, there have been periods of stagnation

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