My friend and collaborator Greg Stolze has a new tabletop RPG locked and loaded: Better Angels, in which supervillains are secretly possessed by demons and have to engage in cartoonish villainy to prevent their demon from engaging in REAL villainy. It’s a great, crazy premise and with this Kickstarter his publisher Arc Dream can get the game produced as a full-color ebook. Got $15? Then check out this new game by a brilliant designer.

Better Angels — A Hell of a Roleplaying Game by Greg Stolze

A demon gave you superpowers and it demands EVIL. Maybe a little over-the-top, thwartable villainy will keep it under control. Maybe.

My fiction collection Delta Green: Strange Authorities is now on sale in epub format for your digital reading pleasure: $7.49 at DriveThruRPG through July 29. It’s a nice fat stack of horror-espionage goodness. Pick it up!

Delta Green: Strange Authorities – Arc Dream Publishing | | Delta GreenDriveThruRPG.com

Delta Green: Strange Authorities – Welcome to our Christmas in July sale! From now until July 29, this title has been marked down by 25%! For more values,

Save

Just finished the first episode of Telltale’s Walking Dead game. The adventure game stuff is about as dull as ever, but the writing, voice acting, and art direction are solid. None of it is really thrilling, but what is thrilling is choosing what kind of a person your character is while the clock ticks down as you make dialogue choices. It has that improv quality: you have to make a strong choice, right now, and live with it. That single piece of gameplay is the best thing about this whole experience and happily Telltale gives you a lot of it.

Kentucky Route Zero is the first project I backed on Kickstarter: an old-school adventure game about a mystical highway beneath the American South. The game is still in development by a couple guys in Chicago and they just posted this five-minute gameplay video. I’m really looking forward to this game, whenever it’s finally done.

http://t.co/7jNQzknT

Recommended.

"Little Billy" Kids Tales for Adults – Read by Terry Bisson

We want to adapt Terry Bisson's hilarious Little Billy stories into a professional audiobook, read by Terry Bisson!

Interesting article on a project that began as an arcade game circa 2001, was entirely hand-animated by dozens of laid-off Disney animators circa 2005, and finally released on iOS last month. It sounds like Dragon’s Lair except all your inputs are emotional rather than physical action.

The game is called The Act and it’s on sale in the App Store for $0.99 right now. I’m downloading it as I type . . .

'The Act's' twenty-year journey to create an "emotion" genre

How Omar Khudari's long in development arcade game dream quietly came to iOS.

Ace of Aces is one of the great tabletop game designs. In some ways it’s really a two-player computer game in paper form. Rick Loomis at Flying Buffalo is bringing it back into print after many years and his Kickstarter wraps up this weekend. It’s a terrific game of WWI aerial combat, easy to learn and fun to play. Get yours!

Ace of Aces rotary series limited edition reprint.

This award-winning game has been out of print for 20 years. I have been asked many times to reprint it, and with your help I can.

The Penny Arcade folks have unveiled the PAX 10, this year’s bumper group of ten indie videogames that will be playable at PAX Prime and representative of the best new games of the year. I’m pleased to see my friends at Bootsnake Games landed their very clever and fun Containment: The Zombie Puzzler games on the list! Congrats to them and check out the ten nominees — some very cool-looking stuff on here.

PAX Prime – Seattle, WA Aug 31-Sep 2, 2012

Cannon Brawl plays like a 2D artillery game and an RTS had a beautiful baby! Directing the action from their airships, players capture gold mines, build cannon towers, shields, and all sorts of other war machines. They upgrade their armies to their most powerful forms to defeat their opponent. Whoev…

I didn’t work on this project, but I am happy to see it released by my group: this is a quick Kinect game replicating the “seven minutes of terror” NASA will experience as they bring the new Curiosity rover to a safe landing on Mars this August 5th. We’ve been talking with NASA about various collaborations for a long time and it’s great to see this free app hit the Xbox dashboard today.

Mars rover lands on Xbox Live

Microsoft and NASA have teamed up on a Mars rover landing game that lets you try to successfully land the craft on the planet.

Tonight I was remembering my days working on IP for Magic: The Gathering back in 1994-95 and how I insisted that we stop using Shakespeare quotes and the like as card flavor text and instead I wrote the Ice Age and Homelands flavor text as IP characters of one magic color talking smack about IP characters of other magic colors, so we could pack double flavor into every line. That was kind of an internal debate at the time. I can’t say the quality of the writing improved — hey, I’m no Shakespeare — but I did create Jaja Ballard out of that, among other characters, so I think it worked out okay. I wrote most of the Ice Age flavor text sitting in my basement apartment late at night listening to the Hellraiser soundtrack. Not sure if that showed . . .