Some examples from a British game, circa 1940, called “Vacuation”; the object of which was to “complete evacuation by discarding every card in the hand.” The packaging reads:
Vacuation
TOPICAL AND FASCINATING
BRITISH MADE
THE GAME OF THE MOMENT
A GAME FOR ALL AGES.
I admit to being properly confused by this image for Don’t Cry Brand sweet potatoes. What is going on here? Is it the story of one man losing a game of dice to a sugary tuber, or maybe the other way around? Is the gentleman rolling dice in order to procure said tuber? Are they comparing the consumption of sweet potatoes to illicit gambling? If anyone can definitively explain the imagery here please, leave a comment. Any illumination would be most appreciated.
I used to play Warhammer years ago as a small awkward boy in the back my friend’s father’s toy store. Every week the store would close early and my friends and I would wage epic war on a massive table covered in detailed landscape we had all put hours of work into. We knew with a grim certainty that this was as cool as we were ever going to get.
Years later I have abandoned that past time in favor of pursuits more closely related to poking unnecessary holes in my face and perfectly replicating the coiffure of a teal cockatoo. However, it may be time to dust off those miniatures once more.
What? You thought I got rid of them?
Apparently Ectomo is a playable type in the Warhammer Universe! Oh sure, they call them “Amber Wizards” but doesn’t that gesture look a bit too familiar? And I’m fairly certain those are the exact dimensions of Eliza’s horribly deformed equine skull resting atop that pike. Further evidence is in the very description of the class:
Their magic is merciless and inhuman, caring little for the ways of Mankind and recognizing the savage heart that lies under the veneer of civilization that adorns every Human soul.
Let’s ignore for a moment the fact that Fez was nominated for two awards at the Independent Games Festival this year. For the sake of argument let us even ignore the fact that it won an award for Excellence in Visual Design and that aside from looking completely gorgeous it is adorable as all hell.
This is a game about a diminutive albinoid with an over-sized head, an affinity for Mediterranean cranial stylings, and a jones for inappropriate nudity. By that description alone your interest should be piqued, though there is another draw, one far too insidious to be unintentional. Don’t see it yet? Give the little bastard a pipe and you, my friend, are playing what is likely to be one of the greatest gaming achievements of our era: a John Brownlee simulator.
For the reasons illustrated in this clip. Four people, two men who look like waiters, one forty-ish housewife, and what appears to be a cracked out, Japanese, Chippendale’s dancer compete at yanking tablecloths out from under plates, utensils, glasses of wine, and bowls of fruit. It is intense.
Seeing as previously I pointed out a Lovecraftian game that could only drive men mad and debase them utterly (which is something I’m sure Cthulhu could actually get behind) I thought it only fair to bring you a game not only steeped in Cthulhu mythos but also worth playing. If a Lovecraftian plot base isn’t enough to please yours the discriminating palate (and why should it?), you’re offered the opportunity to blunder around late 1800’s London as the inimitable Sherlock Holmes. Continue Reading…
This will come as a surprise to those of you who don’t follow our alternate game journalist personas (and why would you?), but next week Eliza and I will be in Tokyo, covering a video game conference for Destructoid as gonzo culture journalists.
What this essentially means is that we are being paid to fly around the world and — in a feverish delirium of alcohol and caffeine that will transform us into the nightmarish caricatures of a Ralph Stedman illustration — write about our surreal adventures. We’re calling it Fear and Lost in Translation and you can read a bit about our plans here.
We’re not very likely to have time to contribute to Ectomo while we’re there, but never fear: we’ve lined up three crackerjack fill-ins from our constabulary of readers. They’ll be introducing themselves over the course of the weekend, but here’s who we’ve lined up…
Despite the fact that you — a genetic freak with pustulous boils erupting from your elecrtified fist — are fighting for your very survival, warily watching the ceilings lest a gravitationally defying spider splicer drop down and pull your guts out through your navel, dodging the monstrous drill bits of golems in antique diving suits that desperately yearn to chew through your sternum… there’s always time to kick back, chomp the stem of a cherry wood apple bowl and light up a fat bowl of heady latakia.
Prepubescent cephalophilia in chalk drawings. I can’t tell you how I got here, or what this scene portends, since it’s a significant spoiler. Let’s just say I refrained from splattering these darling girls brains all over the ground with my insanely overpowered wrenching skills, simply so as not to drown their happy squid.
Eliza has been playing these execrable Lovecraftian text adventures based upon Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book, a journal filled with his ideas for unwritten stories.
These ideas are about as fleshed out as Pig Latin haikus. For example, the most popular game on that page — Dead Cities — is based upon this impenetrable idea:
An impression - city in peril - dead city - equestrian statue - men in closed room - clattering of hooves heard from outside - marvel disclosed on looking out - doubtful ending.
Eliza played it. Oh yes, she played it. This is the start of her epic adventure:
There comes a time in every blogger’s life where the juice of his seemingly inexhaustible wit, his cleverness, have been sucked dry by the slurping protuberances of a million ungrateful readers, their only comment during the ordeal an insect-like cadence uttered to smarmily correct a grammer mistake.
Luckily, you guys are great, the best readers of any blog I’ve ever done, and I can go on forever. But today, I’m exhausted… exhausted from staying up all weekend in the throes of a vibrating, caffeinated gaming sessions.
The game I’m playing is called Bioshock and it is utter genius. The entire game takes place in the subaquatic fever dream of Ayn Rand: an underwater metropolis called Rapture, decadent with art deco trappings, where capitalism and science are unhinged by moral restraints.
Even if you’re not a gamer, you’d do well to check out the clips I’ve embedded above: it’s a playthrough of the demo and shows the first level of the game. If you aren’t sold in the first six minutes, as the bathsyphere sweeps through the labyrinth of skyscrapers as cephalophiles and whales frolic between them and the city’s founder extols a Randian utopia, you shouldn’t be reading this blog. This game defines the ethos of ectoplasmosis.
I’ll be taking today off to explore Rapture. Updates will commence tomorrow. You guys might consider doing the same.
For the man who has always felt ostracized from the board game community for their uncontrollable desire to hump Rich Uncle Pennybags.
Tongue in cheek version of the classic Monopoly. Player tokens are altered - now you can choose from a jeep, teddy bear, blow drier, leather cap, handcuffs or a stiletto heel. Properties have been changed to a ‘gay’ theme as well - e.g. Fire Island and Castro Street. Instead of buying houses and hotels, you can buy bars and bathhouses.
The one departure from the original Monopoly is the inclusion of Family Pride cards. When landing on the appropriate space, the description of a famous gay man is read aloud, and the player that can correctly identify the person can move ahead to any space on the board.
Also different is the addition of Camp Cards. When these are drawn, you must perform the indicated action (ie. ’say: ‘faaabulous!’ six different ways and receive $3).
This is actually surprisingly similar to the homebrew version of Monopoly I’ve been playing for quite a while.
Unhallowed Metropolis is the tabletop roleplaying game of retropostapocalyptic horror that I’ve been working on for the past couple years. The process has been arduous, the art draining, the photography persnickety, and the entire concept so ludicrously appealing that I did it anyway.
It has been two hundred years since first the outbreak of the Plague, when without warning the dead rose to feed on the flesh of the living. […]
Seventy percent of the world’s population succumbed to the Plague, secondary epidemics, or the mass starvation that followed.
The year was 1905; it was the dawn of a new dark age.
In the following decades, the survivors to learned to fight back and to retake what they had lost. Recalling the golden age that had come before, the Neo-Victorians set out to rebuild their shattered nation. […]
London 2105. The capitol of the Neo-Victorian Empire is a vast, densely crowded city surrounded by fortifications fifty-feet high. The dead walk the Wastelands beyond the walls, and spontaneous outbreaks of the Plague ravage the population within. It is only through constant vigilance and massed firepower that order is maintained.
I heard recently from Jason Soles, one of the writers and project heads (the other being Nicole Vega) that the first UnMet book will be released at GenCon Indy, a gigantic gaming convention in Indianapolis. I will probably be in attendance to sign and shmooze, we’ll be hawking books and prints, and you’ll finally get to see what the hell we’ve been posting about for the past however many months.
Most Furries in Second Life have adopted the classic “anthropomorphic” animal, like a cartoon animal. The Lindens even offer such an avatar as one of the basic shapes you can choose when you are born in Second Life. If one uses such an avatar, and one has sexual congress with another avatar, either human or furry, is that bestiality?
As much as furries make me want to pour undiluted bleach all over my skin, I’d rather them hump in their little Second Life ghetto than on my front lawn.
Dawn lifts the contours of your canopy bed from silver to blue and finally to gold. The French maid, a fat little hag who has given you stinkeye since you stepped through the marble foyer in your wedding finery, shlubs in to make the fire. You hear her wheezing as she bends over the hearth, her corset creaking like a fleet of fishing skiffs on a rip tide.
There’s no way she could know, not with the velvet curtains drawn around the bed, but your new husband, lord of the manor, is slowly cooling beside you. He died happy, the pervert, and you can still see the bruises faintly on his neck. Perhaps designating the safeword “manifest destiny” was a bad idea. Either way, he didn’t stop you and by the time the stars swam from your eyes, his had already glazed over.
And now, somehow, you must escape this fusty sepulchre, and get to the estate lawyers before his old bitch of a mother does. Never fear, young lady, for you are armed with the only two weapons a woman of breeding ever need bear: soft words, and slappin’ hands.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
Eliza has been playing these execrable Lovecraftian text adventures based upon Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book, a journal filled with his ideas for unwritten stories. 
