Rolling Deep; Science Fiction Characters

Sometimes we need to hit the streets, and those can be dangerous places. Angry-drunk bros, wannabes, stray animals, people from Jersey- all potential hazards to the nerd on the town. It is important in these times of imminent societal collapse that we remember to always roll with homies, and if possible, roll deep. Personally, I find four to be the optimum deepness for rolling. Here are the soldiers I want at my back.

1. Rorschach

Resume: Insane Vigilante (The Watchman)
Strengths: Ingenuity, Focus

A man consumed by revenge, near mad from an insatiable craving for delivering justice- Rorschach will make you safe anywhere. Unlike most vigilantes, he lives amongst the people he hates, spending every waking moment gently simmering with vexation and drowsy wrath. He is untrained, he has almost no equipment, only his fists, instincts, and an uncanny ability to turn anything into a lethal weapon, including his foes themselves. In essence, he is Batman with no money. And he will break you.




2. Zoe Washburne

Resume: Gun Hand (Firefly)
Strengths: Bravery, Loyalty, Marksmanship

Zoe can deliver great pain, and look incredible the whole while; She's a veteran soldier, has high proficiency with firearms, and a punch-you-right-now attitude. Unflinching loyalty also comes with the package.



3. Fang

Resume: Werewolf, One of his hands is a gun (Contra: Hard Corps)
Strengths: One of his hands is a gun, Denim

Everyone needs a cyborg werewolf soldier who has a mini-gun for an arm. Also: fashion sense.






4. Kyozo

Resume: Bodyguard, Super Soldier (The Red Star)
Strengths: Combat

Kyozo is a giant of a man, capable of killing you with his bare hands. He also knows how to operate every weapon in existence and sneak like a ninja. You won't see him.

A Formal Dinner: Science Fiction Heroes

Questions are great fun for my friends; A chill night, a comfortable couch, a stomach satisfied with its contents, and lips savoring a cold brew. Then the questions begin to circle the group:

"Where is the Nyan Cat going?"

With the follow up:

"What flavor filling does it have?"

Or

"If your girlfriend puts a phallic object into your rectum, is it homosexual?"

With the follow up:

"What if the object is a mold of your own penis?"

But our favorites are the choices of dinner guests, party guests, or people to hang with. Generally, these people are not real. For example, the following is four people with whom I'd like to have a formal dinner, you know, a classy beer or wine, five courses, suit and tie, music and high society surround.

 1.  Jean-Luc Picard

Resume: Captain of the United Federation of Planets
Strengths: Command, Diplomacy, Valor, Virtue, Curiosity, Tolerance
Interests: Cultural Anthropology, History, Literature, Sailing

Picard was born to a well-to-do family in France, enjoying a childhood of strenuous private schools and near aristocracy. Despite a privileged upbringing, Captain Picard became a man of intellect and culture, dedicated to positive ideals: a man most are proud simply to have met.

He enjoys command, but lacks the ambition to advance further than he has, fearing the loss of the freedom the Enterprise gives him. This speaks to his romantic nature, and his desire for adventure. At the table, he would be affable, inquisitive, but perhaps a bit formal until the ice is broken. Finally, he is a walking library of near-death experiences and meetings with important personages.


2. William Adama 

Resume: Admiral  of the Colonial Fleet
Strengths: Command, Military Strategy, Valor, Determination, Willpower
Interests: Flying, Model Building, Boxing, Literature, Public Speaking

While similar to Captain Picard in professional occupation, Adama of a different, though equally admirable, breed. He is the son of a civil rights lawyer, and enjoyed a relatively mundane middle-class childhood. As a young man, he was commissioned as a bottom ranking pilot, and Adama bathed in the fires of the First Cylon War.  Immediately following, he left the service to begin a life as a common deck hand on commercial freighters. Only upon rejoining the military as a calmer, more experienced man, did Adama begin rising in the ranks. A down-to-earth titan who worked for everything he ever received.

Perhaps gruff and carrying a disdain more most false niceties, Admiral Adama carries the aura of a good man striving to do the best he can. Neither gregarious nor frivolous, Adama is serious and often taciturn.  He is knowledgeable in what he knows, and willing to learn what he does not. Like Picard, he holds a mountain of potential stories, but they, and Adama himself, would need to be drawn into the conversation.

3. V

Resume: Revolutionary, Renaissance Man
Strengths: Empathy, Valor, Devotion, Intellect
Interests: Literature, History, Classic Movies, Philosophy, Martial Arts

Though most of his background is a mystery, we know that V is likely a man arrested for homosexuality by the Norsefire administration and then medically experimented upon. Upon his escape, V engaged in what can only be described as a vigorous self-reconstruction and/or transformation. Self-educated in world literature; revolutionary rhetoric, history, and philosophy; and perhaps even greco-roman speech-craft; V is a brilliant mind commanded by an obsession for revenge, kept in tight reign against hypocrisy by a rigid, if alternative, sense of right and wrong.

He is also charming and fantastically witty, quite capable of tossing back small-talk, engaging others at the table, and then delving into topics of more intellectual sustenance.

4. Professor Charles Xavier

Resume: Headmaster of Xavier's School for the Gifted, Professor of Physics, Founder of a Pro-Peace Vigilante Group
Strengths: Intellect, Empathy, Nurturing Nature, Merciful
Hobbies: Teaching, Helping People, Theoretical Science and Invention

Possibly some distant ancestor of Jean-Luc Picard, Charles Xavier is a kind-hearted man of action. He is an iconic defender, of peace, of the powerless, of the emotionally distraught. But he is not afraid to fight to do so, in fact, he favors a pro-active approach, often seeking out conflict with those who would do harm.

A benevolently polite personality, Xavier would happily venture down any path a wandering conversation may follow. His insights into the human psyche would add powerful observations to most any serious discussion.

Review: Doom 64

My father was a big fan of Doom when it arrived to the Playstation. He used to keep a library of index cards with his own statistics on them, kill percentages, items found, secrets discovered, the works. I liked to shoot things and make it to the next level. So with a bit of nostalgia, I loaded up Doom 64, and I found I missed out on a horrible game.

This is what a waste of money looks like.

Doom 64 is Doom, which would be a big "duh," I suppose, except there definitely isn't any "64" anywhere in the game. It runs exactly like the computer classic of old, save the textures are smoother. That is literally the only advantage to this 64 version. Otherwise, it is essentially Doom 1 or 2, with a crappy new weapon, torturous level design, and a complete lack of imagination. And the cacodemons have arms now.

Hi! Am I scary?

The original Doom pulled off atmosphere perfectly. The first 9 levels were harrowing, but then you step into the ring with two Princes of Hell and are terrified out of your mind. In fact, Doom did a great job of providing a memorable first encounter for each enemy type; Either putting them far away to shoot at you in a new and expected way (first imp), have you hear their snarls for a while before you see them (pinkys) or walk into their temples (Baron of Hell).

The original.

Doom 64 ignores this concept and just throws crap at you in large numbers. The first time you meet a pinky is when you open a door and it's sort of standing in the middle of the next room waiting for you to shoot it in the face with a shotgun. The first Hell Prince walks down a long hallway at you. Towards your rocket launcher. And after the initial encounter, it's like the games designers were RTS fans: Drag-select tons of guys, tell them to attack. Done. Yes, the player wades through the legions of Hell, but it's BORING.

At first, slaughtering demons is unwieldy because of the N64 joystick controller. Doom 64 only requires Left and Right, so the other 8 or so direction the joystick has are superfluous. You'll find yourself over-turning, over-correcting, and trying to aim up at enemies above you when it is impossible to do so. However, these issues fade away after the first few levels as you become used to the controls.

Well- don't have to worry about missing here.

And onward to slaughter you go. In over 50 levels of convoluted mazes, you will encounter endless swarms of monster. None of them are outright dangerous or challenging, as running around while shooting is the dominant tactic. In fact, the only dangerous enemy are flying skulls, as they are hard to aim at, and they fly from halfway across the level to bite your face. Being caught in narrow corridors with big nasties is probably the biggest challenge you will face...

...Outside the levels themselves. Many of the stages in Doom 64 are designed by some variety of basket-case. They are convoluted, have rooms of similar appearance, and provide no hint as to how to solve certain puzzles. In the middle of the game, I became so frustrated running through empty levels trying to figure out what I missed that I just downloaded the Gamefaqs.com guide so I could actually beat the damn things. Except that the guide is text-based, and finally I was unable to even use the FAQ to figure out where the hell I was, so I stopped playing at around level 42 with the Hell King yet unchallenged. The level design made the game so unbearable I will never play it again for the rest of my life.

The most common scene in the game: a place you have already been.

If you like Doom, don't play Doom 64. It sucks. Just play the old ones, or jump right on to Doom 3.

MegaMek on Mekwars:Legends

I don't always play video games. No. Sometimes I delve into the deeper chasms of Nerdor. Through the Dead Marsh of Mobile Games, up the Stairs of Consoles, through the ever-labyrinthine horrors of PC gaming; all to wander the dice-filled wastes far beyond the realm of sanity and close to Mt. Doom, spewing that Cheetos remnant that always gets on the tips of your fingers. Verily, I have rolled 20s, and they were good.

All OS covered.

MegaMek is not so multifaceted as other table-top games, in fact, it has 3/5 the facets as the well-known Dungeons and Dragons. But the two games are unrelated except in the sense that only we outcasts of society gather to entertain ourselves with them. Fans of this game can laugh at those other elf-eared nerds... while showing each other how they painted their miniature robot men.

We see this. In our brains.

 Anyway, MegaMek is a freeware Java version of the Classic Battletech tabletop game, a sci-fi military tactical experience, with dice, endless sheets of damage recording papers, and battlemechs! Yes, those of us who have strapped on neurohelmets can truly understand the awesome power of these three-story tall death machines. And now they are really small!

This is what normal people see. (The small PC screenshot is the MegaMek version of this situation).

Essentially, MegaMek takes all of the pain-in-the-ass rules, calculations, dice-rolling, and damage-tracking that made the tabletop game so fun/drawn-out-pain-in-the-ass and makes your computer do it. After that, all you need to think about is strategy and tactics, using your carefully constructed army to devastate those of the opponent. Think Panzer General and you won't be that far off.

In fact, the tactical element is really the entire game. The core experience is maneuvering your forces in such a way that your pilots have a better chance of hitting their targets than getting shot themselves. Then, you designate your troops their targets, and cross your fingers as the Random Number Generator decides (with two six-sided dice) if they hit anything. Repeat until your enemy's mechs are piles of molten scrap metal.

This is exciting. Providing you know what the hell is going on.

Like the table-top game, all of the action is turn-based, with each player taking turns moving their units. But you will be busy anticipating your enemy's moves, carefully measuring the ranges of their weapons, and exploiting the battlefield terrain. Every game is dynamic, every game is fun- because your opponents are always human players (though the game has a rudimentary bot function.)

However, facing human players has one draw back: human players can be incredibly good at a game. And since many of the diehards playing MegaMek online have been playing for years, if not decades, the learning curve is incredibly steep. Going from never-played to I-just-won-my-first-game-yay took 10 games. 10 terrible, devastating, crushing, humbling, and educational defeats. Not to mention watching perhaps five games between veterans, reading the table-top game's source books, and asking many, many questions. Those who put in that time are well rewarded with an endlessly rich game for arm-chair generals.

For the merely curious: you will be scared away.

Where to play it?

MegaMek does not feature any sort of matchmaking device within the client, so it is up to you to find games. There are several websites that manage some form of MegaMek matches, often keeping track of units through message boards and what not. For people like me (i.e. would like a little customization, but mostly just mechs to shoot people with), I've found the Mekwars: Legends server to be amazing. It wraps the MegaMek client into a program that keeps track of the entire galaxy, and each player takes command of a military unit in a galactic empire. So not only do you get tactical games with another player, you can give your conquests meaning by taking over the galaxy planet by planet with a large team of other players.