Brazil  (1985) is one of those movies that lurks in the back of our collective subconscious, its influence generally felt rather than referenced directly ( Futurama  shout-outs notwithstanding). An image, like the interrogation baby mask or the microscopic computer screens, will bubble up occasionally, and of course, there's the legendary ending... and everything Terry Gilliam had to do to make sure that ending even made it into the film. But  Brazil  is a movie with something to say, a visually and conceptually dense satire of the world into which it was released... and more appropriate to our own world with each passing year. So, for the fortieth anniversary of the American release, Never Say Dice is going to take a ride down the pneumatic tube into the all-too familiar nightmare of  Brazil , both as dark satire and as a holiday film. -  B A Side : Brazil certainly isn’t a Christmas movie that I’d watch every year. Come to think of it, this may be ...

There have been all sorts of physical "pranks" throughout time, often played on "nerds." The Wet Willie, the Hertz Donut , wedgies, noogies, snake bites, melvins (not the Melvins), towel snaps, titty twisters, swirlies, the Atomic Wedgie. Today though, we’re going to talk about pantsing. Or, really, almost the opposite of pantsing... Reverse Pantsing? That might be another wedgie-style "prank." This falls somewhere in between and is hard to describe, so we’ll just go over a quick rundown of yet another rule-breaking spell abuse meme. You may have caught a few more of these featured elsewhere on the blog .  To paraphrase in our own words, this one goes a little something like:  Player : I cast Immovable Object on the BBEG ’s pants. Distance spell so I don’t need to touch him. DM : Okay, but I don’t think it can be worn, held or carried. Player : Nope, read it. No saving throw either. I’m going to up cast it to 6th level to make it permanent. DM : Okay... ...

It's been weird seeing news articles about the first three  Zork  games this past week. The fact that Microsoft has officially put them into the public domain is certainly newsworthy, and offers a (likely naive) hope that this will set a standard for the future of older titles, but these games are extremely important to me as both player and scholar of gaming history, and deserve a closer (and, naturally, more personal) look than they're being afforded by the recent news coverage. So let's grab our trusty battered brass lamp and delve into the ruins of the Great Underground Empire, to LOOK AT, EXAMINE, and INSPECT the original  Zork  trilogy. It's essentially sheer luck that my first exposure to interactive fiction, as we call it today, was the first  Zork . If I played anything prior to that, it didn't make enough of an impression for me to remember it. The uncle responsible for the hand-me-down Commodore 64, the first computer to belong to me personally, proba...

It was a dark and stormy night…what does reading that evoke in your mind? Is there a mental, or even physical and audible, groan when you see or hear that in a story? Perhaps you don’t have such an immediate reaction, but, cliché or not,  the phrase still brings to mind the gloomy and wretched environment it's meant to draw you into. After all, who wants to be out in the rain, and in the dark , no less? It can make you feel like Garbage . That isn’t to say a good walk in the rain can’t be refreshing, but we’re talking about a dark, and likely very cold, night... doesn’t seem like the best of times (though possibly the blurst of times) to be out in a storm. Recently, I came across a quote “'It was a dark and stormy night' - we can do better than that!” It's the challenge that inspired this post, so... Can we do better than that? Well, certainly we can do better than that. It's actually strange to the question asked directly rather than an assumed hypothetical. Whil...

Recently, I've been undertaking a task that I've been putting off for... literal decades, now that I think about it - retrieving and sorting the books that went into bins in my parents' basement when I first moved out of their house. As we've talked about plenty of times, you can glean a lot about person from their chosen media, and our selves are no exception. While a lot of books I uncovered were from my teens and early twenties, there were a few favorites going back to when I was much younger. One of the most beloved books that greeted me for the first time in nearly twenty years was  The Book of Lists ,  accompanied by two of the follow-up volumes. They're the kind of book that, thanks to easy-to-access internet, seem downright quaint now, but there was a time when they, especially the first volume, were my constant companions. At the time, I think I was more focused on the sheer amount of knowledge (some of which was rather... spicy for a kid my age) available ...

One of the great things about being into retrogames in the present era is how many surprises are continually being unearthed - their digital spectral forms ripped from dwindling (and sometimes literally rotting ) physical media, given new life via patches, translations, or undubs, and set loose in the unseemly back alleys of the internet. One such feat of gaming necromancy was revealed to the world earlier in this Spookiest of Months: an English version of the notorious (for anyone that's even heard of it) "first-person surrealist horror pinball game"  Paranoiascape , originally released in Japan in 1998 for the original Playstation. To my (probable) shame as a fan of bizarre and creative titles from a more "Wild West" era of gaming, I was previously unaware of it. To my (certain) shame as a fan of genre film and 90s music videos, I was also unaware of the game's creator, one " Screaming Mad George ," who has credits as special effects and makeup...

As usual, it wouldn’t be the spooky season here at Never Say Dice if we didn’t dust off some nostalgic childhood memories and use them as gaming inspiration . As we've discussed before, it shouldn’t be too surprising, given how much macabre media molded the childhoods of 80s and 90s children - very much including ourselves. We’ve even already posted about a number of things from Boglins to Beatlejuices , and (probably) some other letters of the alphabet. More than a few of these tiny bits of nostalgia are proudly disgusting, like Blurp Balls or just good ol' generic ooze. ( Everything was oozy or slimy in the late 80s and early 90s! Venkman got slimed , the Ninja/Hero Turtles got oozed ... and I cared for none of that stuff. I can’t be the only one from that era who had this kind of textural issue.) One thing that fits right in with all the strangeness of the era is the bizarre phenomenon known as the Garbage Pail Kids : sets of trading cards produced by Topps, and designed ...

As we all know by now, it's difficult for this blog to not look at popular things and rip them apart and/or break them down. It doesn’t matter if they’re classic tropes from our favorite media or popular videos of stupid rules interpretations that engagement baiters have proliferated. The  trope this particular post covers will be a classic one : You All Meet at an Inn., also sometimes known as You All Meet at a Tavern. While it would probably be enjoyable (and fairly easy), to take this one down a notch this post is going to take a different approach than usual and support the trope's use. You might say this post is "Inn Defense" of the Inn as a starting point in games and stories. So for this week, read along as we fend off the major complaints and extoll the benefits of using the Inn (or Tavern) for your launch.  Where Everybody Knows Your Name “You all meet at an inn (or tavern).” You can probably already hear the players groan as you trot out the time-tested ope...

Typically, you’ll see posts from me attempting to break a particular meme or trope related to gaming and the ways the rules of our fantasy worlds play out . It's rather enjoyable to pick apart the bait content engagement farmers put out there without giving them credit. For this post, I’d like to take a look at a particular trope that involves something very important in our lives today: when the jester makes fun of the King, they're likely to lose their head... something our TV court jesters have felt lately, particularly Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel. What I’m talking about is censorship. Which is something that should worry those of us who consume media in all its forms just as much as it worries content creators, both big ones like the Colberts and Kimmels of the world, and small fry like us folks here at Never Say Dice. So for this week, let's talk a bit about censorship.  Funny What happened to Kimmel and Colbert isn’t funny. Of course, there are some that would a...

I don't know poker, not really , but I'm learning. It's the most legendary and storied of card games, especially since bridge, once a cornerstone of suburban American living, has mostly faded into the mists of history. Terms like "fold," "ante," and "wild card" are all part of our general lexicon. Regular "poker nights" provide complex characterization and plot foreshadowing in some of my all-time favorite media, including  M*A*S*H  and  Star Trek: The Next Generation . For all its history and still-visible presence (we all remember the online poker craze about 15 years ago), there's still a certain mystique to the game. Not only because of the dark, smoky rooms the game brings to mind, or the litany of terms and traditions that have amassed over the years, but because poker is about the  player  as much as it's about the game. Analyzing the other players, not only for how the play but psychologically, sniffing out hidden ...