October 2005 Archives

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Jmac and guest host Joe Johnston take a look at space-themed games.

• Space Station Assault, a simple and fast-paced card game of interstellar violence.
• The Awful Green Things From Outer Space, a B-movie inspired board game almost as old as I am. Designed by the legendary Tom Wham and most recently published by Steve Jackson Games.
• The Ur-Quan Masters, which is what the open-source port of Star Control 2 is called for legal reasons. I forgot to ever mention the correct name in the show, but it's actually not all that important. Anyway: an excellent free port of a classic space adventure game from the early 1990s. The player's guide I mention on the air is over on my weblog.
• SpaceWar! is seen only briefly, when I use it to illustrate a point I make about SC2. But it really is one of the first video games, and you can play a Java version of it in your Web browser.

This episode looks a lot better than the previous one, don't you think? It was entirely shot in the SCAT studio with an excellent crew. It actually doesn't make use of a "board-cam" we rigged up to continuously film an overhead shot of the table during games. Maybe I'll edit some of those shots in later, but Joe Constantine did such a good job directing the player-cameras that I didn't really feel the need to do the extra work.

I also mention The Interactive Fiction Competition, a.k.a. the IFComp, as an aside before the first segment. If you want to see (and maybe help judge) the latest efforts from the amateur text adventure creation community, do have a look.