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

How did we get by so long without the term “retcon?” As a phrase, “retroactive continuity” goes back to at least 1973, with our current definition appearing a decade later to describe some of the way DC comics was engaging contemporary storylines with characters and plots from decades prior. Even without a name, the concept is about as old as storytelling itself, with some retcons becoming such a significant part of their respective narratives that they’d be unthinkable without them - no one involved in the creation of the 1977 film considered Vader to be Luke’s father, but inserting that retcon into The Empire Strikes Back has defined every iteration of Star Wars ever since. But “retcon” is a term that carries as many connotations as it has applications, with plenty of room for interpretation as to what exactly counts as a retcon, what it effect retconning has on a work, and how that in turn affects an audience’s relationship with that work and its creators. So this week, let’s take a

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

If you want to become proficient, or even competitive, at games it is likely going to  take a lot of practice. You aren’t likely to win the first game of chess you play (unless someone is letting you), and of course there is strategy to learn after you get the basics down. The same can be said for many kinds of games. Certainly the skills required in sports need practice to become good at them. Dribbling, passing, catching, scoring. You might have some innate abilities, but there is always something to improve. If you don’t, you might embarrass yourself when you get out there on the courtfieldpitchrink. Sometimes even seemingly simple games like Go become deceptively complicated when you start digging in. Can the same be said of tabletop roleplaying games? Do we need to practice them, and if so what do we practice? Ponder the answers as Never Say Dice discusses practicing TTRPGs. Isn’t it just "pretend with rules?" What is there to practice? One simple description of tabletop

The methods of Claus, the Great and Powerful are universally known, told, quite literally, in song and story. (Much of the established canon comes from one particular poem , in fact, making it both a song and a story.) Long before the Elf/Shelf Surveillance Network was set up, we were assured that Santa simply knew if we were "bad" or "good," and admonished to be the latter if we had any hope of receiving the presents we were expecting. The punitive lump of coal is an interesting holdover from an era when the stuff was commonplace - but it persisted long after most children had ever seen a lump of coal, let alone had to help carry it or feed it into home furnace (there also being an implication of punishment and drudgery for those benighted children unfortunate enough to find themselves part of an anthracite yuletide). But... you never actually hear about those, do you? That's a side of St. Nicholas rarely seen. Some regional traditions pass these duties off t

Thanksgiving really is one of the most American of holidays (if you ignore that weird Canadian version , anyway). Even more than, say, Independence Day, there's a clear disconnect between the celebration itself, the story it's commemorating, and the actual messy history. It is, in its own way, an origin myth of (white) American identity - of Europeans fleeing persecution to a new land, which welcomes them through both a bountiful harvest and the kindness of a native population willing to share it with them. It's the pilot episode for Manifest Destiny , blatantly ahistorical to even most elementary school students, and, weirdly enough, genuinely accepted as such. Most depictions of the holiday, at least prior to the rush of Cold War hagiography that presented American history as a theatrical attraction with a "NO COMMIES" sign at the entrance, was focused on the imagery of food and family. Specific foods at that, making this one of the few ritualistic meals to surv

Celebrate good times. Come on. It’s a celebration. (I will.) Between birthdays (and births), deaths, adoptions, holidays, graduations, engagements and weddings, honors of all kinds, personal milestones (like a 100th blog post ), and everything in between, our regular lives are simply filled with opportunities to celebrate. Just looking at the month of November in the US we have Dios de Los Muertos, All Saint’s Day, All Soul’s Day, Daylight Savings, Election Day, Veteran’s Day, and Thanksgiving... and that's just hitting the “big” things in the US. That leaves out all sorts of official (like Native American Heritage Month) and unofficial (National Fast Food Day) recognitions. It also doesn’t recognize that Halloween just passed and holidays like Hanukkah, Christmas, and Kwanzaa as well as many others are on their way. While we may have touched on adding holidays in other posts, it would be good to talk about celebrations in general. So take a moment to celebrate with your parties an