FRDT Author - The Meta Weta

I have a strange relationship with the Dark Souls series. On the one hand, the only true Dark Souls game I've played is Dark Souls 3, and not for very long because I wasn't having fun with it. On the other hand, through watching other people play through the other games I have developed a fascination and kind of grudging respect for the series as a whole.  If nothing else, there's no denying the success and critical acclaim the series has received: anything that lends its name to a new sub-genre of role-playing video game is worthy of analysis. 'Soul-like' or 'souls-borne' games are reasonably commonplace now, characterized by difficult gameplay, branching path exploration and the developers taking sadistic glee in human suffering. The particular Soul-like I've played the most is Salt and Sanctuary, which is pretty much exactly the same as Dark Souls except it's a side-scrolling action platformer with better controls. Oops, shots fired.  It i...

Being the paleontology nerd I am, it's no surprise that one of the first things I put up on this blog is that a Far Cry game with dinosaurs would be totally friggin' sweet .  Hell yes.  On a similar note, I recently got hooked on the topic of speculative zoology. In particular, a specific website dedicated to one rather bizarre thought experiment: what if you seeded a world with just enough life to support a population of canaries, and just let natural selection take its course for millions of years? That website is Serina: A Natural History of the World of Birds  (the brainchild of artist Dylan Bajda, a.k.a Seather888 ), which is one of the best hard-science speculative zoology projects I've ever heard of. Piece by piece, the reader is taken through a journey through millions of years of evolution on the moon of Serina, as the canaries and other creatures diversify and evolve into some truly bizarre and epic creatures. In fact, it's mostly the creature design ...

I don't really believe in Hack & Slash Dungeon Crawlers. Which is weird, because I've played quite a few over the years and have even occasionally enjoyed it.  Grim but fun! For those not familiar with the genre, Hack & Slashers and Dungeon Crawlers are frequently overlapping genres of video game where the primary focus is usually on murdering hundreds upon hundreds of monsters and collecting the piles of loot that explode out of them upon death like grisly pinatas. It's an exaggeration of the usual style of Role-Playing Game, be it paper-based or in video game form, where goblins inexplicably vomit up plate armour and heroes are often only as great as the trousers they wear.  These pants, for instance, are probably smarter, stronger and more dexterous than their owner.  Time-consuming, repetitive, a lack of actual constructed content and an over-reliance on procedurally generated loot with all the heart and soul of a Wall Street banker should ...