Captain’s log, stardate 2010.33
I have been thrust directly into a world of intrigue and excitement. My life as a space captain began without much warning, as I found myself playing a large part in rescuing a Federation ship from the evil Borg. My reward for these heroics is my very own ship- kind of an odd reward system really, but who am I to judge. After spending a nearly infinite amount of time with the litany of options the Federation has provided me in order to customize everything from my uniform to my haircut to the design of my ship, I am finally ready to begin my journey in the USS Monsieur Rougeur. If these first few hours of action are any indication of what my career will be like, my excitement is palpable.

Let me set the scene for you- the date was 1999. The Euro was brand new, Napster was getting ready to bring music downloading out of the seedy back alleys of IRC, everybody still had jobs, a certain governor of Texas calling himself a “compassionate conservative” wasn’t a laughable statement, and computers were looked down upon with scorn and fear due to the role they were so obviously about to play in ending human civilization. More importantly, it was also the last time Rebellion sprayed their creative acid all over the faces of gamers in the form of an Aliens vs Predator game. I’m conveniently ignoring 2007’s Aliens vs Predator: Requiem for the PSP because it was awful and acknowledging it would make me have to rewrite this intro.

More than a decade later, Rebellion has returned to the table to spray our faces again.

I just realized how awful that sounded, yikes

I was sent this link with the message “Hey man, i’m pretty sure that if you wrote dog books in dog language for dogs, this would be your fan base.”

I think it was supposed to be a compliment. But you guys are so much more adorable than these puppies!

Anyway, I took a little time away from Ripten just to refocus myself on my fiction nonsense. Except more video game posts and reviews coming up next week- that should enthrall many of you who are scratching your heads going “why is my ALL TIME FAVORITE video game journalist rambling on about depressed robots and sci-fi nonsense.” This week was kind of a wash thanks to loss of power/internet and having to dig out from underneath SNOWPOCALYPSE 2K10. I’ll still have a new Sad Robot up for you but I’m pushing it back to Valentine’s Day because, well, it makes sense.

What I mean by that is, add me on Twitter. It is the easiest possible way to get a hold of me and I begrudgingly use it despite the fact it is clearly vapid and… you know what, screw you. I like it.

I was going to reward you six awesome weirdos who read my stuff with a Sad Robot entry a week early, but I didn’t want to burn you all out. So instead, I figured I would tell you about the wonderful sport of Speed Beer.

A few years ago, the awesome Jeph Jacques of the doubly awesome Questionable Content, which is pretty much Tenchi Muyo for Hipsters when you really think about it, invented a game which just astounds me that it hasn’t caught on yet. The game is Speed Beer, and it is perhaps the greatest drinking game ever made. I think Monsieur Jacques can explain the rules better than I;

It is a simple game with simple rules. It should also be remembered that Speed Beer is not necessarily a competition between people, as it is more of a competition against the course. There are also some variants we have added, such as “Team Speed Beer” which would mean teams of two or more per sled, “Championship Speed Beer” which is a race to the bottom of the hill where the loser must drink an entire beer and is more of a direct competition, and my favorite “Time Trial Speed Beer” which needs a very large hill for. Essentially you sled down the hill, and the amount of time you finish behind the winner is the mount of time you must do what the Madden and lanyard crowd refer to as a ‘keg stand.’

Drink responsibly.

Sometimes you all surprise me. The handful of people who actually check this website and, by some absolutely bizarre stretch of the imagination, call themselves fans of mine make it impossible for me to ever get down about anything. I just got an e-mail from someone asking if I was stopping updates for the Exterminators and another from someone else if I was done with video game journalism. I guess from my last couple posts it made it sound like I was done with both, but I’m not. Exterminators will start seeing updates again, and I dialed back my video game journalism commitments so I could focus more on my fiction stuff, I’m still writing full time for Ripten.com- so a no to both questions. Thanks “CupcakeCreator” and “Chad_Vader” for giving a shit about what I do. I’m going to assume the former isn’t the One True God of Cupcakes and that the latter isn’t the real Chad Vader (let me know your twitters and I’ll post them here), but either way I thank you for the sentiment. Knowing people give a shit makes it a lot easier to stay on the ball.

I may end up putting up the next bit of Sad Robot a little earlier than expected just because you people make the circuitry and wires where my heart used to be so fuzzy.

I promised you a new project would be starting now that I’ve cut down on my game journalism responsibilities and recommitted to my starving artistness, and here it is.

SAD ROBOT is a tale about, what else, a robot. Although he isn’t very sad. Not all the time at least. Sad Robot lives in a city, and he, like all the other robots in the city, spends his entire artificially created life training for a job in The Factory, but he doesn’t know why. SAD ROBOT will be an ongoing series of stories about his desire to find out why. And also his desire to find out why he wants to find out why. He has a lot of desires, and he doesn’t really understand any of them either. SAD ROBOT is just a simple story about a robot as he finds himself in a world that wasn’t built for robots that were built like him.

Anything idiotic that NBC does will automatically make me smile since the elimination of poor (well, poor in the sense that he made 30 million dollars for 7 months work) CoCo. I wonder if the pool is still open.

This is not work safe, but you shouldn’t be at work anyway and should be out frolicking in the fields free of commercialization and the evil overlords in polo shirts and bad ties that control your life. But, just in case you are at work, this AIDS awareness spot (you know, just in case you weren’t aware it existed or anything) contains a whole lot of naughty parts. It is also decidedly awesome.

In order to accurately review a game like Blood Bowl, you have to look at it from two entirely separate perspectives. On one hand is the type of gamer who is intimately familiar with the warm embrace of the Warhammer tabletop games and their subgenera. You remember the days of wielding your 28 mm metal miniatures as if they held the power of Thor’s hammer. The rules already lay dormant in the back of your mind, ready to be awoken and destroy Tokyo by the depth charge that is a Blood Bowl video game. On the other hand, you have the other 90% of gamers who are going to play this and didn’t even have a clue that Blood Bowl was a tabletop game to begin with. That gives developer Cyanide the double edged sword of having to make a game that appeals to a large amount of gamers while staying true to the source material. If they pitch the balance too far from one side to the other they will either have a game inaccessible to new comers, or have to face the ire of a whole lot of people who are hardcore enough that they might have the Living Rulebook tattooed all over their body like they are in a Clive Barker novel.

So roll a d16 and see which one you are…