I’m … speechless….

• The RZA talks about being a geek – comics, technology and letting his kids play videogames for 4 hours a day.
• The webcomic XKCD gets animated.

In other nerdy news, I now have an HD TV and boy does my 360 look good!

One of the few books I’m genuinely excitted about at the moment! Can’t wait to get a copy…

GR have done a bit of a closet Mongoose thing of late, publishing increasing numbers of licensed properties alongside their original settings: A Song of Ice and Fire, Wild Cards (George R. R. Martin’s shared world superheros setting), Thieve’s World and the Black Company. More than anyone, they must know how to make this work for them financially. And Dragon Age will expose them to a great new mass of potential customers – there’s already a page up on the official Dragon Age site and presumably there will be mentions in the manual and possible even load screens and the like. Pramas specifically says that:

As for “something needed,” I was talking about a really good intro game for new roleplayers. I don’t think D&D has had that since the early 80s (hence “something overdue”) and the tabletop roleplaying hobby needs new blood. It is not a coincidence that the first release is a boxed set.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think that this is going to bring in these new gamers in large numbers, box set or not. The vast majority of video gamers don’t care about tabletop games – if you look at the offical forums, you’ll see that near everyone commenting on this is an old tabletop RPGer. No one has popped in to say “I’ve always wanted to play a table top RPG and now here’s my chance!”

One other concern I have is that Bioware’s best work has been with other people’s settings. Star Wars and the Forgotten Realms in particular. Mass Effect is the only game of theirs I know with a totally original setting (Jade Empire is pseudo-historical) and I was fairly under whelmed.

I have every faith that GR will do this well and that it will be an interesting game , and I’ll probably pick it up if I like the setting from the game, but I hope no one thinks this is going to make RPGs mainstream again.

However despite my love of the series and the previous games I haven’t played Fallout 3. The reasons behind this a boring and I won’t go into it, but suffice to say that I hope to have the chance to play one day. Just not this year.

Instead I read reviews, talk to people who have and convince myself that one day… one day it will be mine! It’s always amusing to see what Zero Punctuation thinks of games I’m into as well.