Tag: journalism

An Introduction to Ghost Stories

Several years ago, The Physicist and I wandered into our local game store and left with a little game called Ghost Stories. Although we lost horribly the first few times we played, we were hooked. Ghost Stories can be a bitch to win, but it’s also a lot of fun. The premise of the game is game is that a group of Taoist monks (the players) are fighting to save a village from the depredations of the malevolent Wu-Feng and his legion of ghosts. Since a new ghost typically appears each turn, players face an uphill battle to keep the enemy at bay. Thankfully, you’re not completely alone. You can seek aid from the villagers, but a helping hand can have consequences…

I wrote a handy introduction to Ghost Stories for Urban Gaming Elite’s ‘Unplugged’ section. Why don’t you mosey on over to UGE and check it out?

Elevator Pitch Olympics

Last week, I wrote an article for Xconomy.com about the Wisconsin Early Stage Symposium’s Elevator Pitch Olympics. Eighteen entrepreneurs gave ninety-second presentations to a panel of judges, who then rated the entrepreneurs’ performance on a scale of one to five.

The winner, Tyrre Burks of Team Interval, hopes to create a digital platform that will serve as a universal health record for student athletes. He faced stiff competition, though. Steve Visuri of FloraSeq, wants to create a stool bank to facilitate fecal transplants, while Ben West of Concinnity is trying to make it easier for doctors to file reports for the Physician Quality Reporting System (the process is so byzantine that many doctors have opted out of it entirely; according to West, 800,000 physicians miss out on approximately $4 billion annually).

I thought it was interesting that many of the entrepreneurs were reluctant to brag about their credentials, even when it would have helped their pitches. One gentleman wants to develop a drug to treat canine diabetes and then use the profits to fund research in human diabetes. He gave a decent pitch, but he neglected one tiny detail: he’s a famous pancreatic transplant surgeon at the University of Wisconsin. At the end of the competition, the judges stressed that entrepreneurs need to overcome their Midwestern modesty if they want to be noticed by investors. 🙂

 

Wisconsin Patriot Boot Camp

Last weekend, I had the privilege of covering the Techstars Patriot Boot Camp for Xconomy.com. The boot camp aims to give veterans and military spouses the tools they need to become successful entrepreneurs. I really enjoyed hearing the entrepreneurs speak about their business ideas, and I’m glad that Techstars is helping them turn their dreams into reality. You can read my write-up of the event here.

 

New Gig!

I have some exciting news: I will be writing for Urban Gaming Elite! As a longtime gamer, I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to write about an industry that I love.

You can check out my first article here. It’s a preview of a promising RTS game called 0 A.D. If you liked Age of Empires, you’ll probably like 0 A.D. It’s being developed by a team of volunteers from all over the world, and it will be totally free to play when it finally launches. There’s no release date as of yet, but in the meantime, you can play with the alpha build. It’s definitely worth a look.

Some random thoughts that didn’t make it into my article:

  • I question the decision to use Middle Egyptian building names for the Ptolemaic faction. Admittedly, I’m not much of an expert on the Greco-Roman period because it’s boring, but my understanding is that Greek was the language of administration. And if you want to get really pedantic, you could argue that Demotic would be a better choice than Middle Egyptian since Middle Egyptian was only used in highly formal contexts by the Ptolemaic era.
  • The ships look awesome. It’s just a shame you can’t really do much with them at the moment since the AI doesn’t know how to use them yet.
  • I wish the game had more non-Mediterranean civilizations. It seems strange that the Seleucids, Ptolemies, and Macedonians each get their own faction, yet there isn’t a single faction from Eastern Asia (though India is represented by the Mauryans).
  • The game places some annoying restrictions on construction (e.g., you have to build towers a certain distance apart, and civic centers have to be placed a certain distance from resources). One of the great things about old-school RTS games like Age of Empires II is that the game lets you do whatever the hell you want. Want to build fifteen towers right next to each other? You can do that!  Want to build a dozen castles? You can do that, too! The best games are the ones that give you the freedom to do silly things instead of holding your hand or trying to nudge you toward a certain course of action.
  • The skirmish maps suffer from Diablo III Syndrome (i.e., they look really pretty, but they get old after a while since there’s insufficient randomization). I hope the game will eventually have a fully random map mode. Hand-designed maps based on real-world geography are nice, but they reduce the replay value since you eventually come to know them like the back of your hand.