Rockett Science Labs

"Where Yesterday Is Tomorrow"

Gearbox announces Duke Nukem Forever delay with a pretty funny YouTube video

Some background: Duke Nukem Forever has been in development for a mind-boggling 14 years, making it a running joke within the industry. But last year Gearbox Software (which took over the project in 2009) boasted a May 2011 release that would be well worth the wait. The fact that they’re forced to delay it again leaves them vulnerable to merciless criticism. Props to them for meeting the issue head-on, with humility and self-aware humor.

Dragon Age Legends entertains while down

Dragon_age_legends

An important part of the user experience for software is, what happens when it fails? When I loaded the new Facebook game Dragon Age Legends today, an animated sequence showed an armored warrior struggling to get the game to load on his PC before rising up in a rage and smashing it to pieces. The scene was followed by the message, "We apologize for any inconvenience.Dragon Age Legends is temporarily unavailable. Please try back soon..."

We treat the dice as oracles that reveal this other world

People want to believe that illusions could be real; that’s why we go to magic shows. I think the illusion that’s important to us as RPG players is the sense that events in the imagined world have their own independent and pre-existing reality. Even though at one level we know that some of these events are the result of random rolls on a chart, at another level we treat the dice as oracles that reveal this other world. This illusion that both dice rolls and asking “what do I see when I throw a torch into the pit?” are ways of discovering what’s out there in the game-world seems to me vital to what roleplaying is about.
via muleabides.wordpress.com

Link from Jeff's Gameblog

A reason to visit your local game store today: National Unplugging Day starts at sundown

Have you been meaning to stop in at your friendly local game store and pick something up to play with your friends or family? Well, today is a really great day to drop in during your lunch break or on the way home from work, and get a new board, card or tabletop roleplaying game.

This is because today begins the National Day of Unplugging, which starts at sundown tonight and ends at sundown tomorrow. During this time, people who've taken the "unplug challenge" will be disconnecting from all the electronic devices that consume a large part of our time and attention: phones, computers, portable media players, game devices, TVs.

You'll need something to do while unplugged, so how about a game of Werewolves? Pandemic? Win, Lose or Banana? If you play Dragon Age, did you know there's a Dragon Age tabletop RPG? TRUE STORY.

If this unplugging deal sounds remarkably like a Shabbat observance...well, yes. It's part of the Sabbath Manifesto from Reboot (which is a client of the PR agency i work for.) But it's not like you have to be Jewish to turn off your iPod for a day, right?

You can download a Check Out app that helps you unplug from all of your social networks and give your friends a heads-up that you won't be accepting their Vampire Wars requests for 24 hours. And you can join the discussion about National Unplugging Day on Twitter via the #unplug hashtag. Before you unplug, naturally.