I recently stumbled upon The Great Tournament when looking for a new time waster (mobile game). It turned out to be a really fun experience! I'd call it a Choose Your Own Adventure book with RPG stats. The writing is tropey (you're a young villager who serendipitously ends up on adventures) and sometimes a bit lazy (a lot of names and places seem to be outright stolen from other books/games), but it was a lot of fun. You start like an RPG, rolling 5 stat points into 6 or so categories, and as you play your actions influence how your stats grow. It looks like a shallow game, but feels like there's a deep game underneath. I enjoyed it enough to pay the $5 for the add free version.

All in all, you can finish this game in a few hours (depending on how fast you read I suppose). I've played through it twice so far, but haven't beat it. I'm going to wait on a third time though, since similar to reading a book, I know basically what's coming next (the choose your own adventure options do eventually bring you to the same plot points, it's just a matter of how you get there and how ready you are).

I definitely recommend picking the game up and checking it out. Here's a link to the Google Play Store version, but I believe it's available pretty much everywhere.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.hostedgames.greattournament&hl=en

"The Great Tournament" is a 180,000 word interactive fantasy novel by Philip Kempton, where your choices control the story. It's entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

• Choose your attributes and train your skills in order to win in tournaments.
• Become a hero of the realm or use your power to take control over the kingdom.
• Unique combat and character generation ensures no one game is the same.
• Fight for glory, love, or power in the Great Tournament.
• Multiple endings with different story lines.

Throw your hat, land it on someone/something else, become that person/thing.

This is an insane new mechanic. I'd love to find out more about this story line. Has Mario been a zombie of the hat through all the past games?!?

The music sounds incredible. I'm hoping the actual game has a soundtrack like this!

Anyone else completely confused by this trailer?

I only know one truth... it's time for the Jedi... to end

This looks great! I'm leaning back and forth how much info I want on the movie, but in the end, I probably won't be able to resist watching all the trailers :)

Jack and Rich (from Previously Recorded/RedLetterMedia) and Josh (frequent guest) play WWE 2K16 in a three-way brawl in The Battle of The Ladders. Jack and Josh have created characters that look like the two of them and Rich plays an actual character. It's stupid and hilarious. Enjoy!

Edmund McMillen worked on both Super Meat Boy, The Binding of Issac and Gish. Rich plays Gish (badly) and Jack, Rich and Jay all talk to Edmund about everything under the sun. The topics range from bad movies to Chick Tracks to Neil Breen to everything else. It's a fun listen (I recommend it mostly as a podcast as Rich is just playing Gish)


From the December 7th live Twitch stream, Jack, Rich, and Jay Talk with Edmund McMillen who helped make such games as Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac, we talk about Gish and indie games, dead baby dress-up, Indie Game the Movie, Isaac as the go to bathroom game, Neil Breen, so much green, watching bad movies vs Soft Core, spooky stuff, Religion stuff, Chick Tracks, Miami Connection, more bad movie talk, backlash, Isaac’s Religious themes, Microwave Massacre, is Breen real, The Toxic Avenger, Troma, The Pit, Event Horizon, Scary Movies, Edmund worked on Braid, -- Watch live at https://www.twitch.tv/previouslyrecorded_live

Do you like puzzles?

William Elshoff scoured the globe for artifacts of great power. His findings had turned up little until now, he claimed he had found the key to Nibiru!

He locked himself in his study and began to work, he was in there for over a week! When we went to check on him, we discovered he had vanished. That’s why we have summoned you here. We are hoping, with your unique skill set, you and your team can unlock the secrets to Uncle William’s whereabouts and bring him home!

Last week, I received a review pass to Hour To Midnight - Room Escape Games to check out their first puzzle Room, titled The Secrets of Nibiru. I happily accepted it and joined a team of local “influencers” (2 people from hotels and 1 person who works in business networking) who were invited to promote Hour To Midnight. (Cheerful Ghost was contacted to try it out, as we’re a gaming website obviously. Jon couldn’t make it, but he offered the chance to me.) The recommended team size is between 6 and 10, so our team of 4 started out at a disadvantage, but HTM modified the game slightly for our team size (they have different rules for different sized teams).

To begin, one of the HTM employees talked us through the rules and gave us some very general tips, as it was the first time in an Escape Room for any of us. Then we were walked into the room to start, and the door was shut behind us, locking (for legal and fire safety reasons, there’s a panic button to get out if needed). The lights were off and a short narration started, beginning the game. We then had 60 minutes to tear through the study and figure out how to get out. We started out slowly, just looking at everything, but soon started finding clues in random places around the office.

I won’t go into any details about any of the puzzles, but sometimes simply just figuring out what the puzzle was was difficult enough! Everything was logical though and made sense within the room. Puzzles lead to more puzzles throughout. Sometimes, you’ll be working on one puzzle and concurrently someone else will be working on another that will help you along in yours when they’ve finished.

I had an absolute blast! My team didn’t finish within the allotted time, but we got really close, and considering we were a small team of people that didn’t know each other, I was pretty proud of all we got through. Escape Rooms have been something I’ve been very interested in for a couple years now, but just never managed to try one out. Now that I’ve experienced it, I can’t recommend Hour To Midnight enough! Currently there’s only one room finished (this one took around 8 months to put together. The detail they went to is incredible.), but they hope to have a second room finished by the end of the year. And have 2 more rooms in planning/building stages.

Hour To Midnight also has a banquet room, where they can host receptions, office parties, etc. (I’ve already talked with my office manager at work about having an office outing here) When a large group is there, multiple teams can work through the room, and after your team has finished, you can spend your time in the “spoiler room,” where you can watch video feeds of the next teams struggle through the puzzles.

I want to thank Hour To Midnight for inviting Cheerful Ghost to experience their business, and thank Jon for letting me go in his place. I absolutely recommend checking it out for yourself!

For more information or to reserve your room, go to https://www.hourtomidnight.com/, call 503-673-EXIT(3948), or email [email protected]

Jon and I got to meet Ben Heck at the CG booth at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo. He really liked our VHS collection, especially The Abyss :)

Here is a video that combines both the PRGE and his attempt to make a Nintendo PlayStation work.

In the video, he runs into and interviews The 8-Bit Guy (https://www.youtube.com/user/adric22), Clint of Lazy Game Reviews (https://www.youtube.com/user/phreakindee), some guy named Metal Jesus (https://www.youtube.com/user/MetalJesusRocks) and Pat the NES Punk (https://www.youtube.com/user/PatTheNESpunk).

Conan visits the YouTube Space in New York City and is presented with some of the most high-tech, cutting edge virtual reality technology in the world, but he mostly wants to know about porn.

Today is Sunday and it's Day 2 of the Portland Retro Gaming Convention! Jon and I are manning the booth, talking to people and right now we have a speed running competition for Super Mario Bros 3! If you are at the convention come stop by!

An http://www.inquisitr.com article quotes a Takashi Mochizuki (Wall Street reporter) tweet saying "Speculation is Nintendo would unveil NX details in coming week. I guess all we can do is just wait. No announcement from company yet." and speculation that details will be announced as soon as this week!

http://www.inquisitr.com/3606799/nintendo-nx-release-details-imminent-and-beyond-good-and-evil-dated/

The article also pulls a lot of information from this reddit post, by FlapSnapple:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoNX/comments/56jomc/leak_goodies_from_a_large_retail_partner/

I really hope some real information comes soon! But until then, hearing about some packaging and poster art is fun :) (The packaging for the NX is slightly larger than the packaging for the Wii U. Read into that what you want lol)

Jack has never built a PC.

Rich has built a PC.

Rich has the fantastic idea of hooking up a heart rate monitor to Jack as Jack build's his first PC.

This was actually a lot more enjoyable to watch than I thought it would be! I did watch all 4 hours and 49 mins of it (over the course of 2 days). There is a lot of good banter between Jack and Rich, and the twitch viewers were both helpful and entertaining in their hazing of Jack.

Enjoy!

I'm not familiar with any of the Paper Mario games, but this starts out looking cute and adorable, and then transitions into crazy. I kinda love it. The gameplay seems odd, and I wonder if they've tried to make it too unique? I wish I could rent this game to try it out when it comes out :)

At this year's Comic Con International: San Diego, we gave over 500 fans the chance to #WearTheCowl - they are among the first people in the world to play Batman:Arkham VR.

If you haven’t witnessed first-hand what it’s like to become Batman, then the newest trailer for Batman: Arkham VR will give you a glimpse of what players are calling the closest you’ll ever get to stepping into the role of the World's Greatest Detective.

Batman: Arkham VR is the winner of the first ever E3 Game Critics Award for Best VR Game. Developed by Rocksteady Studios, creators of the critically acclaimed Batman: Arkham trilogy, Batman: Arkham VR is based on DC’s core Batman license and will be available exclusively for the PlayStation®4 computer entertainment system with PlayStation®VR in October 2016 for MSRP of $19.99.

I still don't think VR is something I'm going to invest money in, but I love that developers are taking it further and further along. Now that I'm thinking about it, it seems like No Man's Sky would be a good candidate for VR... oh dude, I just remembered that my tv can take a 2D image and make it 3D. I'm going to experiment with that this week!

As we're waiting for the launch to hurry up and get here, here's a fun video about how simulations are getting more and more complex and realistic.


No Man’s Sky is ... gigantic. Players traverse an entire, simulated universe exploring procedurally generated planets; there is practically no limit to what you can see. No Man Sky’s creator Sean Murray estimates that players will see maybe 1% of what the game is capable of generating. On top of that, much of the appearance and behavior of things in that universe–planets, plants, creatures, light itself–is emergent. The creators didn’t decide how stuff looks or behaves on a planet by planet basis. They made systems and rules that generate stuff and decide what happens when various stuffs mingle. Appearances and outcomes aren’t designed; they emerge. No Man’s Sky is lush and naturalistic. It’s detailed and even occasionally… life like. So this begs the question: if we’re able to simulate a universes of massive, life-like complexity–like that of No Man’s Sky–within our universe… should we wonder, or worry, that our own massive… life-like universe is itself… simulated? Today on Idea Channel we discuss No Man Sky and the Simulation Argument!

This is just funny :D