http://thewertzone.blogspot.com/2012/05/asoiafgot-mod-for-crusader-kings-ii.html

A modding team have released their Song of Ice and Fire-based mod for Crusader Kings II, Paradox Interactive's acclaimed medieval dynasty simulator. Crusader Kings II: A Game of Thrones is available right now for free, but you need a copy of Crusader Kings II to play it.


The mod not only alters the existing game setting and factions, it also introduces new features not present in the base game and allows for some amusing changes to the way things fell out in the books, as this report on a campaign indicates:

"An interesting development in my campaign if anyone's interested. Managed to squash Robert's Rebellion after ol' King Aerys met an "unfortunate" end and Rhaegar ascended to the throne. Spared Robert's life which eventually led to him choosing trial by combat. He killed Rhaegar so now I'm playing as Aegon with Varys as my regent. Gotta say, this mod is leaps and bounds ahead of vanilla CK2 and the official ASOIAF games as well."

http://thewertzone.blogspot.com/2012/05/cover-art-for-ice-and-fire-by-david.html

The cover art for Ice and Fire, the fourth book in the revamped, twenty-volume Chung Kuo series, has appeared online. As with the first three books, the cover art is by Larry Rostant.


And with the title (and a slightly different image; it is unclear which is the final version at the moment):



The third volume in the series, The Middle Kingdom, is currently scheduled for release (after a slight delay) on 1 October 2012. Ice and Fire will follow on 1 December. The fifth book, The Art of War, has also been provisionally scheduled for 1 March 2013.

http://thewertzone.blogspot.com/2012/05/fallout-new-vegas-dlc-expansions.html

The phenomenon of DLC - downloadable content - is a controversial one for many gamers. On the one hand, the notion of adding additional content to your game after release, extending its lifespan, is a welcome one. On the other, there is a temptation for developers to hold back features that could have been incorporated into the game at launch to make more money from fans later on, which is not acceptable for many.


Happily, the approach to DLC for the Fallout franchise has been exemplary. Fallout 3 - itself a massive game - was followed by five expansions which added a fair bit of new content to the game. These expansions were varied in tone and structure, but packed a lot of content into modest prices. Fallout: New Vegas continues this fine tradition, with four extremely large expansions released after the main game which expand the playing experience. They are now packaged with the base game in the Fallout: New Vegas Ultimate Edition. For maximum enjoyability, it is recommended you play the expansions in order of release (Dead Money, Honest Hearts, Old World Blues and Lonesome Road), though it's not too much of a problem if you don't. However, I would recommended that New Vegas players get their character to Level 25-30 in the base game before tackling them, as they can be a lot more unforgiving than the main game. Note that installing the DLCs without playing them still raises New Vegas's level limit by a cumulative 20 levels, however, which is extremely helpful.


First up is Dead Money. Investigating a distress call leading to an abandoned Brotherhood of Steel bunker, the Courier falls into a trap and is knocked out. He wakes up in a town near the Sierra Madre, an opulent casino built just before the nuclear apocalypse. His equipment has been taken and a bomb attached to a collar around his neck. A man named Elijah contacts the Courier and informs him that he has been recruited into helping stage an audacious raid on the Sierra Madre's treasure vault. The Courier has to find the other members of his team (a schizophrenic Super Mutant, a mute woman and a dapper ex-entertainer ghoul) scattered about the town, break into the casino and carry out the heist. Needless to say, there are numerous complications. Radios in the town and the casino interfere with the bomb collar and can cause it to detonate if the player is not quick to disable them. Extremely hard-to-kill 'ghost people' lurk in the area and can rise from the dead if not dismembered. Weaponry and ammunition are difficult to find, and the area is also patrolled by invulnerable security holograms equipped with lasers.

Dead Money is probably the weakest of the four DLCs, which is a shame as it is packed with good ideas. It is tremendously atmospheric and exploring the low town whilst dodging clouds of a killer substance and trying not to blow up your own head is effective for a while. Unfortunately, this section of the game goes on for a bit too long, and the last haul before you get into the casino itself (when you have to cross most of the town hunted by packs of ghost people with weaponry and health supplies both in low supply) can be an exercise in frustration. The casino itself presents a fun series of puzzles to overcome, and there is a powerfully-written narrative to follow (via diaries and computer terminal logs) as you uncover the secrets behind the founding and building of the casino, and the doomed romance at the heart of it. The DLC also has a flexible ending, with several options available for the player to wrap up the quest (though be aware that one of them effectively ends the game for good). Overall, it's solid stuff, likely taking 4-6 hours to complete, but the gameplay is a little lacking compared to the strong narrative.


Honest Hearts has the player recruited by the Happy Trails Trading Company, which is trying to open a new caravan route to the township of New Canaan via Zion Valley in Utah. Upon reaching Zion Valley, the Courier's employers are wiped out and he finds himself recruited by the mysterious 'Burned Man' to help end a devastating conflict between the tribes of the valley (a former nature reserve). The Courier has to visit the different factions and either forge a peaceful resolution (an evacuation of one of the tribes) or a more violent one (siding with one of the factions and wiping the other out).

Honest Hearts is an entertaining expansion, featuring some of the best vistas and views in the entire Fallout series to date (and makes one wish that the upgraded Creation Engine from Skyrim could be retrofitted onto it, to make it look even more impressive). Unlike the more restricted environment in Dead Money, this is an open world setting which you can explore at leisure. The quests are strong and the characters memorable, but the narrative is less powerful than Dead Money's, with the expansion ultimately ending with a shoot 'em up sequence no matter what choices you make. The expansion also has a very clunky opening in which it's impossible to save your travelling companions from death (which given New Vegas's normal flexibility is a bit weak) and then almost immediately depicts a confusing melee in which it's very easy to kill your potential allies, resulting in you auto-failing every quest in the DLC instantly. Once you get over that bump, the rest of the expansion is fun with some cool companion characters, good gear and a solid moral conflict at the heart of the story (and a great choice of two endings, neither of which are totally good or bad and have their own advantages and disadvantages). If you power through the game you might take 6 hours to complete it, but a thorough exploration of every cave and point of interest in the valley could take a lot longer. It's more fun than Dead Money in gameplay terms but isn't quite as atmospheric or well-written.


Old World Blues is the jewel in New Vegas's crown. The Courier is drawn to a mysterious broadcast at a drive-in theatre in the Mojave which teleports him to the Big MT, an advanced scientific research outpost located in the middle of a huge crater, isolated from the rest of the world. The scientists there lost their mortal bodies to age decades ago, but have transferred their brains into robots. They apologise to the Courier, as they removed his brain for analysis and have since misplaced it (the Courier is effectively piloting his body on remote-control for the duration of the expansion). The Courier's quest, therefore, is to retrieve his own brain! He also has to discover the secrets of the facility and uncover it's backstory.

Old World Blues is flat-out bonkers. Inspired by 1950s American B-movies, there is a silly - maybe even camp - tone to events. As the expansion was created in early 2011 and released late in the year, I suspect an influence from Portal 2, particularly the Cave Johnson-like voice announcements from a long-dead scientist that accompanies one particular journey. It's the funniest slice of Fallout to date and in places threatens to become inconsistent with the rest of the setting (particularly the teleporting technology, which is an order of magnitude more advanced than what even the occasionally-glimpsed aliens in the series appear to be capable of), though they just about dodge this. It's very funny, but as the Courier completes the quests and uncovers the secrets of the facility it also takes a turn for the tragic, as elements of the backstory come into sharper focus. Completing the main quest in Old World Blues will likely take 8-10 hours (longer than many full games) but exploring the full map and the various facilities will take a lot longer. The reward for completing the DLC is impressive as well: a technologically-advanced house inhabited by various AI assistants (including a homicidal toaster, possibly a tribute to British SF show Red Dwarf), a medical suite and a buy/sell terminal. A cool place to hang out once in a while.


One common thread links the first three DLCs: the Courier keeps finding evidence of a man called Ulysses - codenamed 'Courier Six' - who has taken an interest in the Courier's activities. In Lonesome Road the Courier receives a message from this individual, who has taken up residence in the Divide, a once-prosperous community (visited by the Courier himself many years ago) that was destroyed when some nuclear warheads kept in a nearby silo were accidentally detonated. The Courier is challenged to traverse the length of the radioactive Divide and meet with Ulysses personally. As they move towards a showdown, it becomes clearer that Ulysses and the Courier have an important shared history...even if the Courier cannot remember the significance of it.

Lonesome Road is the most divisive of the four DLCs, mainly because it's very linear. Whilst there is some scope to go off the road and investigate passing areas, most of the time you simply have to press forwards. This linearity seems to go against the ethos of New Vegas and its immense flexibility in allowing players to do what they want in the game, but in this case it may have been a worthwhile sacrifice, as it allows Obsidian to do something very interesting with the narrative. Essentially, the expansion asks the question about what would happen if you were just a randomly-passing NPC in someone else's epic story? Ulysses was the main character of his own Fallout narrative and the Courier a passer-by, but one whose actions had an immense impact on Ulysses, sending him on a huge journey across the Mojave, the Sierra Madre, Zion Valley and the Big MT. The Courier himself barely remembers the incident and is bemused by the whole situation, but must play a crucial role in resolving Ulysses's story, one way or another.

For all its linearity and brevity (at around 4 hours it's the shortest of the expansions, but is still a fair bit longer than the shortest Fallout 3 DLCs, Operation Anchorage and Mothership Zeta), Lonesome Road is still a lot of fun. Combat is entertaining and varied, with a number of side-missions which can be challenging in themselves. The series' most iconic enemies, the deathclaws, are back in force after being low-key in the other New Vegas games, resulting in some tense battles. There's also some interesting narrative developments later on which open up areas further back along the map, allowing for some additional exploration. However, everything is building up to a powerful showdown between the Courier and his apparent nemesis, which is gripping stuff.

Ultimately, the four expansions to Fallout New Vegas are all worthwhile. Even the weakest, Dead Money, is well worth playing and the best, Old World Blues, should be required playing for every Fallout fan. All four are enjoyable and between them they add a significant number of new perks and weapons to the game (cazadores need never worry you again after completing the relevant sub-quest in Old World Blues). But most impressive is the way that each expansion contributes to a genuinely innovative and interesting storyline, which is flexible enough to be played in any order (though it makes slightly more sense to play the expansions in order of release), light enough not to restrict your choices too much but weighty enough to have a real impact. It's no surprise that the writing team behind Planescape: Torment (the greatest western RPG of all time) were behind this offbeat storyline.

Dead Money (***½)
Honest Hearts (****½)
Old World Blues (*****)
Lonesome Road (****½)

http://thewertzone.blogspot.com/2012/05/revised-cover-art-for-forge-of-darkness.html

Via Pat's Fantasy Hotlist, Bantam UK have revised their cover art for Forge of Darkness, the first book in Steven Erikson's Kharkanas Trilogy (a prequel to the Malazan Book of the Fallen sequence). The new artwork has added blueness.


The book will be published on 31 July in the UK and 18 September in the USA.

So, I've been reading Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, which is a quasi-pornotopia. Sex is utterly everywhere in the book, and it's post-capitalist—no scarcity and quantity becomes quality. There's a lot of fetishistic counting of orgasms, doses of semen and urine, etc. Being a Samuel Delany novel, the sex largely involves sucking off dirty and/or homeless guys, dickcheese under foreskins, ass-eating, piss-drinking, and lots of happy strangers. I had to take a break for a while—not because of the incest or the discussion of licking dried shit out of assholes, but because of the nose-picking. And the eating of mucus. And the sharing of mucus. And picking other people's noses.

For a break, I read The Primal Screamer (a recent quote of the day entry!) by Nick Blinko, and Green Girl by Kate Zambreno, both of which were fantastic. They also had some similarities—the main character is observed and manipulated by the narrator; that action is seen in bits and pieces, as though through to hands worth of laced fingers; both are thematically obsessed with another creative medium (music in Primal, film in Girl); both are set in England. In these attributes, they are also utterly different than Spiders, which carries on in a straightforward manner, offers minute detail, finds non-libidinal activity suspicious, and doesn't just take place in the US, but is all about it. And eating snot for sexual purposes.

I'll get back to it in the morning. At 800 pages, I actually left it at work rather than carry it on my commute while reading the other titles. I'm told the mucophilia gets a break about 400 pages in. We'll see...

Regular readers may remember the time when my father met Tom Cruise and taught him how to fake operating a crane for The War of the Worlds. Well, yesterday, he met Katy Perry, also on the pier. She gave a private show for Fleet Week, and my father was involved on hanging a banner on one of the cranes—"Gloria" is the crane's name.

According to my sister who reported the claims of my father to me, Katy Perry managed the hanging of the banner herself and made him re-do it a few times to get it right. This was difficult work, as the banner was pretty high up. Later, he dropped a box of flags from the cherry-picker he was in, sending Perry running for safety. All went well though, and Perry got into her ridiculous outfit and put on a show for the sailors:

Cover art for my novelette "Faster Gun,"  (Working title: "John Henry Holliday is Sick of the These Time-Traveling Assholes") forthcoming on Tor.com this summer.

The artist is Richard Anderson.

http://thewertzone.blogspot.com/2012/05/national-contribute-to-game-of-thrones.html

American rock group The National have contributed to the Game of Thrones Season 2 soundtrack. They have recorded the in-universe song The Rains of Castamere for the Season 2 soundtrack album (presumably meaning it will also appear in one of the two remaining episodes of the season). You can hear the track here.


As fans of the books know, The Rains of Castamere is an extremely important piece of music in Westeros. Written to 'celebrate' the annihilation of the rebellious House Reyne by the newly-installed Lord Tywin Lannister, it serves as an example of the fate that befalls rebels. It soundtracks a vitally important scene in the novel A Storm of Swords that should be coming up in the third season of Game of Thrones (which starts shooting in a few weeks).


For my money, this is a powerful and impressive version of the song from the books. If they use this on that scene from next season, it should be epic. The Season 2 soundtrack will be released on 19 June.

Hey, listen up, true believers.

GAME OF THRONES won the Stan Lee Award for Best Television Program.

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2012/05/scott-snyder-and-sara-pichelli-dominate-stan-lee-awards/

It's not a No-Prize, but it's pretty cool.

'Nuff said.

I'm working on "The Deeps of the Sky" tonight, and generating a regular festival of Words Word Don't Know:

luminesced, tropopause, sheeny, thicks, unnavigable, dartlike,

Meanwhile, I had a little argument with myself on twitter as to whether I should use some modestly bogus science to create a cool special effect. I went with it. ;-) Now I'm stopping because I have to figure out how the protagonist intervenes to stop the Bad Thing from happening, or how he mops up afterward...

Oh, I might have just done so. Woot!