Thoughts While Gaming on Turkey Day

Happy Thanksgiving, from my hole-chewer to yours

Lego Jurassic Park

Wish they'd taken scenes from outside the movies. Lava vents and white water rafting from the Sega Genesis games, T-Rex swimming from the book, a Lost World level playing as two T-Rexes, another level playing as dinos clearing humans off the cargo ship and crashing it into the San Diego press conference... I bet you can play as raptors on motorcycles during free play. Wonder if you can unlock a Brachiosaurus.

Mars

Back in high school I had a vision for a game halfway between a "World of StarCraft" and Sid Meier's Pirates, with the emphasis on base building while sticking to a single character point of view.

I planned to justify Martian habitability by piping sunlight through a wormhole with one end between Earth and the Sun and the other above Mars. Side effects would've included shielding the Martian atmosphere from solar wind, regalvanizing Martian vulcanism, and reducing sunlight over Mercury or Venus.

Mars is great. The Tharsis volcanoes are antipodal from the huge Hellas impact basin, the Valles Marineris makes the planet look like a tomato that's split after heavy rain, there's evidence of ancient tsunamis, Dr. Manhattan's vacation home... Mars is great.

A Martian day is not quite forty minutes longer than Earth's, and a Martian year is just about three Earth-months short of how long Earth takes to orbit past Mars, so it's real tempting to try and construct a martian clock and calendar which align with Earth's. I think my last scheme involved naming the days of the Martian week for whatever Earth cities best matched its time zone.

Shadowrun Hostile Takeover Map

Don't know if anything ever came of this. It's a lovely aesthetic. Got to find a way to get similarly vibrant highlights into less trafficked parts of the map though. 

RWBY Boardgame

Surprisingly okay. It's a cooperative DPS optimization game (I've only played one other). The rulebook could use some polish.

People teaching us had played only once before, with mistakes: on one hand making minions spawn and attack too often, and on the other hand awarding themselves too much XP for damaging the main villain. They say it balanced out.

[To Be Continued]