" He came dancing across the water With his galleons and guns Looking for the New World And that palace in the sun..." - Neil Young, "Corte z the Killer" (1975) I'm aware that I bring up Ozark Softscape's 1984 game The Seven Cities of Gold rather frequently for a title that's mostly remembered today for its influence later series like Civilization . But it's a very significant game for me personally, not only because it was, for me,  an early demonstration of the medium's potential richness and depth, but because some thirty-six years later, I keep coming back to it. There's the cartographical indulgence Seven Cities foregrounds, of course, and an appreciation of the game's mechanics I wouldn't have had at seven years old, especially since so many are hidden, left for the players themselves to deduce. But there's a reason I kept going back, both as a kid and as an emulator-savvy adult, every Columbus Day: a longing for repai...

By now, my love of older electronic games should be well-established. Indeed, over the time we've been doing this blog, I've only delved deeper and deeper, more than tripling the number of vintage consoles I have on-hand, hooked up, and ready to go. And while we can look to the pandemic and the money saved by not having to regularly commute lifestyle changes that came with it, the fact is, the propensity was always there - I have always loved older technology, especially if it operates in ways fundamentally different than modern equivalents. And compared to, say, vintage guitar and bass amplifiers (something else I have in... "generous" quantities), consoles are relatively cheap, don't take up much space, and can be used late into the night without risk of noise complaints (provided I'm using headphones). They all have their own quirks, their own histories and unique libraries, and, since they were all released in my lifetime, personal connotations. Each cons...

It's come a few times, but we here at Never Say Dice have a somewhat unique generational viewpoint as "cuspers" or X-lennials or whatever they're calling us this week. We were the very last students to have our primary schooling take place in entirely the twentieth century, and while they were on their way out, we still received a fair amount of Cold War rhetoric and American Exceptionalism, especially in the earlier years of elementary school. Notably, we got some of the final vestiges of the kind of " Great Man theory " our parents also received, curricula full of flawless figures, sanitized into simple stories for easy digestion by attention-deficient pupils: founding fathers, war hero presidents, tireless inventors... In our region, at least we were lucky enough to cover Martin Luther King and Harriet Tubman, their fascinating lives stripped down to a few selflessly heroic actions that helped solve the crises of their day. They were special, unique peopl...

As we've discussed here before, electronic games have a fascinating relationship to “player characters,” with a number of evolutionary paths developing ever since players were first asked to identity as the captain of a spaceship, the spaceship itself, or a nondescript adventurer about to descend into a colossal cave. The only thing that defined characters was their role within the game and the means through which the player interacted to fulfill that role. Anything beyond that was, to borrow a phrase, an exercise for the player’s imagination. It's easy to assume that most people approached these stories as shapes to move around a screen or math problems to systematically solved, but there's also no reason not to think players might have filled out these scenarios with elaborate backstories of their own or (in the case of Star Trek ) connecting them to an established setting, characters, and storyline. Either way, creators had little to work with, given their limitations b...

Electronic gaming has changed a lot over the years, and we at Never Say Dice have been lucky enough to experience these changes first-hand. As the scope and potential of games has grown, so too have distribution networks, allowing us to find and buy games that physical stores might not have thought worthy to stock. The shift to digital distribution has brought countless benefits (and, we must acknowledge, a fair number of drawbacks), but it’s completely removed one element that seemed an integral part of electronic gaming in our youths: the printed manual. This week, we thought we’d take a moment to appreciate this now-lost aspect of physical gaming media and how it helped define the gaming experience of its era. - B B : The shift away from manuals predates the rise of the digital storefront, of course. As storage media developed and games were able to integrate more and more of the material that had to be offloaded into a physical manual, packaging got smaller and smaller. In the cart...

Like it or not, the electronic gaming landscape is dominated by long-running series, and has been since its early days . No matter when you read this, if you take a look at the current best–selling games, you’ll see a list that’s almost entirely sequels, off-shoots, reboots, or remakes of any of the above. This is something the medium inherited largely from the comic and cinematic industries it’s modeled after, but also reflects a certain risk-aversion as development costs skyrocket and mere success is insufficient to keep a studio afloat : name recognition is a safe bet. Publishers can assume some baseline of sales from dedicated fans who will always buy the latest installment of their favorite series. We at Never Say Dice can’t say that we’re totally immune to established gaming franchises , but for the most part we don’t stay on top of series with numerous installments like Assassin’s Creed , Final Fantasy , or Call of Duty . (Not that this will keep these games from filling out ...

You find them in all sorts of video games, even ones that aren’t RPGs. Some are special little Easter eggs, like including the original version of the game as an accessible dream sequenc e. Others are extra mechanics that get you through different sections or obstacles . A great many are in there just for fun , with a bonus if you’re going for 100% completionism . We’re talking about... the minigame! They break away from the regular monotony of gameplay and give you something fresh or reskinned, a new challenge to accomplish, or just a little bit of variety. Minigames bring all of that color to our video gaming worlds from the Wolfenstein nightmare sequence, to arcade machines and races in GTA, to everything else in between. The concept of a minigame can also bring those same kinds of advantages to our tabletop games. Current Content There are many different ways to incorporate a minigame into your tabletop sessions. One that you may already be incorporating are puzzle-style games. It ...

It's been just over two years since I first talked about SHUMPs as part of " Pew-Pew Zoom ," a series of posts on the history of narrative in video games set in space. (At some point I'll have enough experience to cover 4X and other strategic space game genres as well.) Since then, I've found myself bit by the SHMUP bug and put a lot more time not only into playing these games, but learning more about their history and the culture surrounding them. So this week, I thought we'd do a quick update on the fastest growing genre in my game collection and the discoveries I've made along the way. To start with, while my first SHMUP post was almost endearingly retro-brained (the most recent game I mentioned will turn 30 this year) and that, even though I've acquired many newer games, most of my actual play falls in the era I originally covered: the late 80s and early 90s. My genre associations were largely with the 16-bit era of consoles, so most of my foray...