The latest issue of Games Quarterly Magazine is available for downloading now. Print copies should show in mailboxes and in better game stores everywhere soon. If you dig through it, you should be able to find an article I wrote on Peter Adkison’s new company (Hidden City Games) and its new game (Clout Fantasy). It’s a collectible game, but instead of playing cards or moving miniatures, you throw poker chips. It should debut at Gen Con Indy (which is run by Peter’s other company, which he started after leaving the first company he founded: Wizards of the Coast).
Human Head’s Secret: Prey
The cat’s officially out of the bag, so now I can finally talk about Human Head Studios‘ top-secret video game: Prey. For those of you who have been playing PC games forever, you might remember that 3DRealms, the makers of Duke Nukem, promised to come out with one particular game before Duke Nukem Forever. That game was Prey.
Human Head has been working on the game under 3DRealms wing for years, and it’s finally coming to light. Gamespot.com has a great interview about Prey on their site, with lots more details, if you’re curious.
When I worked in the Human Head offices, I had the privilege of watching Prey develop and to playtest a few of the levels. This game is amazing. If you’re a first-person shooter or science fiction fan (or, better yet, both), you’re going to want this bad. It uses the Doom 3 engine, so it’s gorgeous, but the gameplay is fantastic too. Time to think about upgrading systems.
Blood of Heroes Coming Soon
A hot-off-the-presses copy of Loren Coleman’s Blood of Heroes showed up via UPS today. It looks great, and I have high hopes that it will make a great launch for Ace Books new line of Age of Conan novels set in Conan’s homeworld of Hyboria. The book is due on shelves on May 31, so soon you’ll all be able to get copies of your own too.
I had little to do with this book other than checking through the page proofs just before it went to press. My predecessor on the line, Jeff Conner, handled the actual story editing instead. Still, I feel a bit of pride to see the book made real. I hope you’ll all enjoy it.
Rolling Along
The weekend went well. The kids were great, and we spent lots of time over at my mom’s house, playing with her and many other members of our extended family. In the evenings, I managed to get through the proofs for Songs of Victory, the last volume in Loren Coleman’s Legends of Kern trilogy for the new Age of Hyboria series of novels due out from Ace starting this summer.
I also made plans to attend Games Day Chicago, the closest Games Workshop convention, on July 30. We should have advance copies of my Blood Bowl
Home (Not) Alone
Ann’s brother Nick graduates from Northern Michigan University today, up in beautiful (and nearly arctic) Marquette, Michigan. Ann and Marty (our eldest) made the trek up to help Nick celebrate this long-awaited event. That leaves me home alone with the quads, who are nearly three. So far, they’ve been great, although I can hear them barking at each other through the bars of their cages–I mean, cribs–in the next room while they’re supposed to be napping.
So, if I don’t get a whole lot done this weekend, I think you can understand why. 🙂
Character for a Cause
On eBay, Loren Coleman is auctioning off the right to become a character in an upcoming BattleTech or Mechwarrior novel. All proceeds go to the American Stroke Association, through the efforts of Loren and his wife Heather.
Loren’s also writing the first trilogy in the upcoming line of Age of Conan novels I’m editing for Conan Properties and Ace Books. As I started up on the job (I began with his second book; Jeff Conner worked on the first), Loren noted that I had developed his first large writing product ever: Chronomancer for TSR. He’d actually written it for Mayfair Games‘ Role Aids line of licensed D&D products, but when TSR bought the line the book went to them too. While it’s long out of print, you can still buy a PDF version from RPGnow.com.
Anyhow, if you’d like to be written into the BattleTech universe, here’s your chance, and it’s all for a great cause.
E-mail Tests Work
Stephen David Wark wrote to tell me that the e-mail notifications aren’t working. After a few tests, I figured out the problem. They do work, but only if I post directly within the WordPress backend software. If I use ecto, my favorite blogging software for the Mac, the e-mail notification plugin doesn’t recognize the post. There are a couple workarounds for this, so e-mail readers can expect a solution in time for the next post.
NAV Bites My Swapfile
If you don’t have a Mac, you might want to tune this one out. If you do, be sure to read it.
Read More
Free Discord, Today Only
In honor of it being 5/5/05, John Wick has put up the text of one of his upcoming games, Discordia, as a free PDF on his LiveJournal. It’s only going to be there for free for one day: today. So hustle on over there and grab it. I haven’t had a chance to read my own copy yet, but if John’s up to his usual level of quality then we’re all in for a treat.
Subscribe Now!
If you check the pop-open menus to the right, you’ll see a new one: Subscribe. Click on that, and it exposes a link that lets you sign up to get an e-mail whenever I post something here. That way you don’t have to surf by here every few days to see what’s going on. You can just wait for a notice to pop up in your inbox.
If you did this on the old site, please register again. If you didn’t, this is your chance to give it a try.
Of course, if you have a newsreader (like , you can subscribe to two RSS feeds at the bottom of the page instead. The first is for the standard posts, but with the second you can subscribe to all the comments posted here too.
For those of you who do subscribe to the e-mail notices, would you rather get the entire post in the e-mail or just a link back to the site? I have it set up to just provide a link now, but I can alter that at will, it seems.
WordPress does rock.