By J.G. Newman
I typically don’t role-play when I play games. Which isn’t to say I don’t invest deeply in whatever game I’m playing; my emotional connection to my avatar is just fueled more by traditional audience-to-character empathy than actually inhabiting the role of whatever druid or space marine whose shoes the game places me in…
In Lesson Two, we finished drawing Space Assault’s playfield, complete with our seven Vegetation Processing Plants that we must protect with the Fission Gun Tower. The planet Kala is strangely quiet, which can only mean the Clovis aliens are ready to attack—as soon as we learn how to get them on the screen!
In the early 1980s, the spectrum of opinions regarding life after a nuclear exchange ranged from that held by the scientific establishment—at best a severely compromised environment, and at worst the extinction of the human race—to another, less pessimistic view that sensed an opportunity for a mankind neutered by the shackles of modern society to return to the more unambiguous, manly, uncompromised moral certainties of a simpler age…
American society collectively shuddered in November 1978 as news of the Jonestown cult mass death began to filter home from Guyana. Jim Jones, head of the Peoples Temple, commanded the death of over 900 of his followers, as well as the murder of a U.S. Congressman, four journalists, and a defecting Temple member, in a spasm of cult violence never seen before in the modern age…
By K.E. Roberts
Early in Penelope Spheeris’ 1981 documentary on the Los Angeles punk scene, she asks Eugene, a 14-year-old skinhead who talks like a Valley kid, what he likes about punk. “It’s like, it’s not bullshit,” he responds. “There’s no rock stars now, you know?” It’s to the director’s credit that the next hour and a half, elapsing with the speed and eloquence of an autobahn car crash, both proves and refutes that answer…
It would be nice to say that Les Edwards needs no introduction, but it might be more accurate to say that he should need no introduction. Despite the vast influence his work has exerted upon science fiction, horror, and fantasy illustration over the last forty-odd years, he remains perhaps less well-known than he deserves outside the battlements of genre art…
If you’re like me, and you played Dungeons & Dragons in the ’70s and ‘80s, then you likely encountered someone who told you you were going to Hell. Maybe your born again aunt slipped you the infamous Jack Chick pamphlet, Dark Dungeons…
The Circus Report, if this particular issue is indicative, was put together like an old-school zine: clip art, text laid out in a handful of different fonts, very clearly mocked up on a photocopier, and so forth. But these stories aren’t about the latest indie bands. They’re news articles about minor-league circuses in trouble for animal cruelty…
By J.G. Newman
What should have been a couple-session run-through of an old RPG somehow morphed into a piecemeal, month-long slog. It’s the first “historically significant” game I’ve played that feels like a cave painting, a work enjoyable only as a first step toward things to come…
In Lesson One, we learned that the first step in the execution of an Atari BASIC game is usually drawing the playfield, which had to be done pixel by pixel. We plotted 50 random stars as a start, leaving Space Assault’s playfield somewhat less than exciting. Let’s continue by drawing the game’s only weapon, the mighty Fission Gun Tower…
