This Week in Geekdom

Happy weekend everyone! I know it's probably more than a little sad, but I've started the countdown to Gen Con 2014 already. Safe travels to everyone making their way back from the con! As mentioned yesterday, I'm in the process of parsing through notes from everyone who was on the ground in Indianapolis these past four days and will summarize all the vicarious goodness for you all next week. In the meantime, on to This Week in Geekdom!

TV

We talked yesterday about one of the big geeky TV events of the week, but Heroes of Cosplay is hardly the last offering the Syfy network intends to make to its nerdy constituents. Fangasm is another "docu-series" (i.e. reality show) in the vein of Heroes of Cosplay but the latter's forthcoming replacement will focus on "all aspects of fanboy and fangirl culture." Right. Seven contestants...err...cast members are pitted against one another as they intern for Stan Lee's Comikaze Expo and vie for opportunities to work for Mr. Lee full-time once the show wraps up. The show will grace the airwaves on Tuesday, September 24th.

Science/Technology

One of the biggest technology stories of the week came to us courtesy of Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla. Mr. Musk produced images of his proposal for a "Hyperloop", a high-speed pseudo-train composed of lightweight pods. Pods within the Hyperloop would be capable of attaining speeds of up to 760 mph (1223.1 kph), allowing passengers to travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco in only 35 minutes. Check out some of the images from the proposal here.

The latest issue of the journal Nature Communications contains findings from a research team based at the University of Pittsburgh that was able to cultivate human heart tissue in their lab, then coaxed the tissue to beat of its own accord.

Ever wanted to build your own centrifuge ('cause who doesn't?)? All it'll cost you is $50 USD in materials according to these guys.

Maryland-based energy start-up Redox Power Systems produced this prototype of their dishwasher-sized solid oxide fuel cell. The company claims that their methane-powered cell can operate at 80% efficiency at a relatively competitive price when stacked against conventional energy sources.

Owning one of these may also up your supervillain cred

Ok, so it's the year 2013 and flying cars still aren't a widely available thing. Would you be willing to settle for a personal jetpack?

100,000 Earthlings, the GIR included, have signed up for the Mars One Project, essentially a one-way trip to the Red Planet. Here's a brief rundown of just what these intrepid individuals hope to be a part of.

Remember a few weeks back when we talked about Google's attempt to bring the internet to every nook and cranny on the planet with a flotilla of wi-fi producing balloons? Here's a breakdown of just how many UFO sightings were blamed on this endeavor. 

Tuesday's full moon was, in fact, a blue moon. Say what? But there's only been one full moon in August! Ah, astute observation. Here's the explanation behind this somewhat convoluted concept.

In another knock against the usefulness of diamonds, a team of chemists at Rice University have developed synthetic carbyne which, if perfected, could be the strongest known material. Here's how these scientists were able to reproduce what had previously been relegated to interstellar space.

Do you use Windows? Was your PC acting a bit...odd this week? Turns out, that might not be due to your antivirus software expiring.

SpaceX had a straight out of Kerbal Space Program moment on Wednesday when they launched their new "Grasshopper" rocket, turned it sideways, then brought it back down to Earth. See for yourself here.

Fastest commute ever.

Games

This week was fairly heavy on new titles for consoles and PCs alike. Saints Row IV was one such eagerly anticipated release. Here's PC Gamer's take on the latest installment of that franchise.

Another of this week's prime releases was Space Hulk, the PC version of the beloved board game of the same name set in the Warhammer 40K universe. Normally astute game news producer Rock, Paper, Shotgun caused something of a kerfuffle immediately following the release with their less-than-flattering review of the game (despite claiming that it was 'Game of the Year' material during the beta) that may or may not have missed the mark. Read here to decide for yourself.

Payday 2 hit the market on Tuesday and already appears to be a worthy successor to its forebear.

At this point, we've all seen and heard video games being scapegoated for a plethora of societal ills, health ailments, and tragic events. Just how is this negative narrative shaping video games as a whole? The Wall Street Journal sought to find out.

On Thursday, Kalypso Media announced that their much adored Tropico franchise will get a new installment in 2014.

In another blow to EA, several major collegiate football conferences have pulled their logos and other likenesses out of future incarnations of the NCAA Football series. The move doesn't impact licensing rights for individual schools within the conferences, but it does make for an additional legal headache for EA.

Archeologists unearthed proof that nerds have been creating and playing board games for millennia. The recovery team, based in Turkey's Ege University, found these intricately carved tokens estimated to be 5,000 years old.

Activision Blizzard caused a buzz on the interwebs this week by unveiling a new multiplayer mode for Call of Duty: Ghosts. The developer also confirmed that the game will also feature the option to play as a woman. Check out the full details of the announcement here. 

Movies

New looks at the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy movie! (includes a peek at Nova Prime)

Another entry in the "shut up and take my money" category: this Metroid fan film attempting to obtain funding via Kickstarter.

Speaking of fan films, Star Wars: Smuggler's Run may have just taken the bar and hurled it into to the stratosphere.  Not only is this 22 minute flick an impressive feat in itself (using an operating budget of $10,000 USD and taking 14 months to produce) but it used the original Star Wars sets. Oliver Thompson, I salute you.

General Awesomeness

The entirety of the comics multiverse in infographic form. <rushes to find a retailer of this book>

What kind of D&D character would you be? This rather thorough (129 questions) survey aims to provide you with the most accurate answer to that question.

Bummed out that Breaking Bad is going off the air? Lego now has a way for you to capture the essence of your favorite TV show in plastic brick form (i.e. the best form).

As always, best wishes for the week ahead!

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Review: Heroes of Cosplay

Hey everyone! It seems as though this summer has just evaporated, or maybe those "Back to School/Summer Clearance" sales follow Christmas marketing campaign protocols and just keep appearing earlier and earlier in the season. In any case, it's somehow mid-August and at this point in just about any other year this post would be replaced by a "see you guys after Gen Con" notice. Even though the GIR and I did our damnedest to mentally prepare ourselves to miss the convention this year, I was still more than a little bummed out on Thursday at 10am EST imagining the doors to the dealer hall being flung open to kick off the festivities. The past few days have literally been a deluge of note-taking, video-watching, and twitter following to try and glean the most from what's coming out of the Indianapolis Convention Center, the results of which will be mushed together in the form of a review-in-abstentia post next week.

Before the sad attempts to approximate the Gen Con experience, the week brought an interesting distraction. On Tuesday, the Syfy network debuted its latest attempt to capitalize on the Nerdaissance, Heroes of Cosplay. When news of the new reality series hit the interwebs back in early July it was greeted with equal parts dread and pronounced skepticism. For every instance of, "it's Syfy...who would take them seriously enough for this to matter?" there were six more, "This is going to ruin cosplay! Our hobby can't be brought to the mainstream! They're going to make us all look crazy. We'll never be taken seriously! <insert flailing and panicking here>"

So, now that the first episode has been released to the masses, was it really all that bad? Are we at risk of having cosplay besmirched by melodramatic keening and unskilled TV producers?

No. Not at all. 

Deep cleansing breaths guys. For all the angst and anticipation, the show really and truly was not as bad as it could have been. Was it good? Eh, not really. My verdict thus far, one episode in, is not that the show was decent, it just wasn't as horrific as much of the community had feared it would be nor is it likely have an appreciable impact on the culture as a whole.

Brief synopsis: Heroes of Cosplay is a reality series framed around the efforts of nine cosplayers with varying degrees of costuming experience as they create ensembles to compete in contests at a handful of conventions.

First and foremost it's a reality show, so there's a considerable dose of manufactured drama both from the cast members and the producers. The instances of catty behavior (of which there were only a few) that met the lenses appeared to be just as much individual insecurity/narcissism as it was tactical editing, but no more or less so than any other show of its ilk. Secondly, though the program makes itself out to be this big expose of cosplay practices and culture, it's focus is remarkably narrow, but more on this in a minute.

The Good:  Yes, there was some good. For serious. Heroes of Cosplay did a surprisingly decent job conveying the fundamental motivations for most cosplayers: adoration of the subject matter and a deep love of the creative process. This would probably be less of a consideration were the show a documentary rather than a reality series, but the fact that the cosplayers were not depicted as crazed divas utterly detached from the world outside of costuming should give members of the community cause to sigh in a bit of relief. The show could just as easily have also been, "let's gawk at these insane adults who play dress-up in public!" Thankfully, that was not the case.

The show also handled some of the logistical and pragmatic aspects of cosplaying with a measure of care. The audience got to see that yes, making a costume is often a very time-consuming process that involves a diverse set of skills. Yes, the materials and machinery sometimes required to pull an outfit together can be very costly. Yes, the act of transporting a costume, getting it on your person, and walking around in it can be nerve-wracking, especially if you're trying to pull something together quickly or are unfamiliar with a given convention.

A very interesting point Heroes of Cosplay brought up (and arguably overemphasized) is the notion of "going pro", of actually deriving your primary income from cosplaying which, quite frankly, is still really novel. It's amazing and fairly awesome that such a thing is possible and is one aspect of the Nerdaissance that hasn't gotten much press: that an increasing consumer base can also translate to revenue streams that never existed before. Correspondingly, this new profitability can allow an increasing number of nerds to make transmute their hobbies into their careers. Interestingly enough, the show made no discernible effort to glamorize the concept of being a professional cosplayer. It was very clear that such a profession involves a substantial amount of hard work to receive intermittent, irregular payouts in a best-case scenario. The so-called titular heroes are all at various stages of development with regard to a career in cosplay and all are given ample opportunity to leverage their screen time into advertising.

The Bad: As mentioned above, the scope of the show itself is pretty narrow in that it revolves around costume competitions at various conventions. One of the cast members made a point of mentioning that this wasn't normal for her, that contests were a wholly new experience. This is the case for most cosplayers and the standard costumed convention experience is pretty much relegated to highlight reels and dynamic alternatives to a star wipe. The decision to focus on contests is understandable: it's contained, has a definitive outcome, naturally builds drama and tension, etc, etc. However, this presents a skewed perspective of cosplay but I suppose Heroes of Convention Costume Contests doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

Correspondingly, the conditions under which the heroes have to make their outfits are almost comically strained. Very few cosplayers would try to throw an outfit together in less than a week, yet this is what the show expects of its cast. Granted, the cast also have access to their "teams" of creative minions so the show often felt like someone had taken their best idea of what nerds should be and tacked them on to Project Runway. Also, some of the choices made by the heroes led me to believe they were actively counseled to undertake dramatically arduous construction processes (either that or they just really didn't know what they were doing). One cast member, attempting a Merida costume, sighed and huffed over having to change a blonde curly wig to a red hue by coloring each strand by hand with a magic marker. She claimed it would take 15-30 hours of work to complete. You know what you can have shipped to you (at the shoot's locale in Oregon) in approximately that time frame? A red curly wig. 

It's understandable to try and foster some level of drama for the sake of entertainment, but the intercessions by producers on this "reality" show were eye-rollingly blatant.

The Ugly: It wouldn't be a reality show without at least some level of in-fighting, condescension, and pompous behavior. While it didn't possess these to the same degree as other programs, Heroes of Cosplay definitely had all three elements in play almost from the get-go. Perennial cosplayer and cast member Yaya Han was regularly depicted as prima donna (despite doing just the opposite when having her shoot promos for the show) while others were alternately whiny, snippy, and mercurial. 

One cast member probably made the majority of the cosplay community cringe collectively mere moments after she was introduced. An actress by trade, there was a great show made of her self-prescribed "method training" to get into character. Don't get me wrong, trying to get into character is almost never a bad thing when you're cosplaying, but this girl was every bad stereotype of a high school drama club diva rolled into one. Furthermore, it was quite clear that this particular cast member is into the hobby largely for the attention as one of the other heroes pointed out that the Drama Diva had a very limited repertoire of costuming skills and played primarily to characters that merely suited her body type rather than those from properties that she had a personal attachment to. The Diva admitted this was true. We are fortunate that there was only one of these amongst the ranks of the heroes.

Lastly, the casting itself was disappointing. While it's great to see highly talented and experienced members of the cosplay community like Yaya Han and Riki LeCotey get more publicity, the actual makeup of the cast underscored some of the demographic issues plaguing our avocation. Of the nine heroes, only 1, Yaya Han, was not Caucasian and only 1, Jesse Lagers, was not female. Every single cast member was very slender and one was almost assuredly surgically enhanced. Yes, yes viewers usually want to see pretty people on TV, but you're telling me there's not a single size 12 semi-pro cosplayer out there? There wasn't a single African American cosplayer to be found? Meh.

So there it is. Not great, but far better than it easily could have been. With only 6 episodes in the season, it will be interesting to see what Syfy does when the show's run is complete. And hey, we don't know just how many of the network's resources it will take in order to make the much-anticipated sequel to Sharknado.

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Game Review: Star Wars: Edge of the Empire (Part I)

Apparently this is the "week" of many weeks. For you elasmobrancholophiles with cable access, it's the much-anticipated Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. Plenty of opportunities to view your favorite cartilaginous fish and to use the word elasmobrancholophile! It also happens to be Geek Week on YouTube. The latter is...of dubious quality, but maybe gets a pat on the back for trying? <watches> Nope, doesn't even merit that. Do you guys think this might be a sign that pop culture has hit "Peak Nerd"?

In any case, I was loathe to register that the entire work week now stands between me and a chance to run a second session of Star Wars: Edge of the Empire. I'm still garnering feedback from my players, but it seems that my first attempt at GMing wasn't an epic failure! At least it seems that way, given that said players haven't run screaming into the night. But, my neophyte nerd-herding aside, you guys probably want to know how the system itself played and I aim to deliver on that.

Yes, seriously. How was it?

All in all, a very fun, highly flexible game and a refreshing departure from dungeon crawling. It's quite clear that Fantasy Flight wanted this to be a game that gets your neurons fired up and the creative juices flowing. It has a few dense bits, rules-wise, but it seems as though you can easily iron those out over time either by making table-sanctioned adjustments or just building up raw experience.

You know I have to ask: How did your players take to using the custom dice?

Last year, when I procured a copyof the beta rulebook, my well-practiced GM friends latched onto the system's requisite fudge dice with a heavy air of derision. Contrary to their near-unanimous preemptive verdict of "game killer", my players were able to pick up the mechanic very quickly. It'll likely be another session or two before everyone is completely comfortable with it, but the novelty didn't impact the pace or flow of the session at all.

Not nearly as complicated as they look

To backtrack a little, Edge of the Empire utilizes a set of custom narrative dice for its core mechanic which you can either purchase at your local game store/FFG's site or download the dice app to your smartphone. The rulebook does include a table by which you could convert results from standard 8 and 12-sided dice, but that extra step does detract from the fluidity of gameplay. The actual mechanic is a pool of dice that individual players assemble each time they want to make a check. Checks can be anything from basic perception to flying a YT-1300 and plotting routes through hyperspace (each of these having attending skills that players may or may not have allotted themselves during character creation). The player rolls his/her pool of dice and the GM will roll a complementing pool against that check, deriving the latter from things like environmental effects or the ferocity of an NPC opponent. If the PC's dice turn up more Success symbols than there are Failure symbols on the GM's dice, the check succeeds. Pretty simple yeah?

It doesn't end there though. The truly engaging aspect of the narrative dice is the supported flexibility they give both the players and the GM to decide how events hinging on checks play out. It's not so cut-and-dry as "the check succeeds/fails." Interspersed with the Success and Failure symbols are Advantages and Threats. Though the latter do not actually sway the fundamental outcome of a given check, they represent the degree, scope, and ancillary effects of the action in question and involve input from both the PCs and the GM. It's entirely possible to have a PC fail a check, but end the action with unanticipated gains. Layered atop all the aforementioned possibilities are the Triumph and Despair symbols, which can function like critical hits on steroids depending on what other symbols turn up in a given check. In short, the dice do exactly what they were intended to do, which is facilitate the roleplaying aspect of the game.

But you said you're only one session in. How could you possible garner enough information at this early stage?

Ah, very true. As such, this review is based heavily on my own study of the rules, walking my players through the character creation process, and initial impressions from the table. 

Character Creation

Arguably everyone's favorite process, Edge of the Empire delivers a unique method for crafting your in-game avatar that can produce results as simple or complex as you'd prefer. Though the game lists out base stats for 8 races, a GM knowledgeable in the Star Wars Universe can easily adapt the fundamentals to accommodate any alien species you can imagine (which several have already done here). After selecting a species, players can choose from a handful of careers ranging from wisecracking smuggler to brash hired gun to silent-death-from-above bounty hunter. In between determining all that, players must give thought to what makes their character tick by selecting an Obligation. Since the entirety of this game universe is set in the lawless Outer Rim, the general bent of Obligation is who or what finds your character useful or, if not useful, wants you dead? Players have the option to entwine their back stories and share their Obligation or simply band together as a matter of convenience (at least initially). Everyone seemed to pick this process up quickly. Total time spent on the construction process ranged from 20 minutes (she had a very defined idea) to over 2 hours (he had several great ideas and needed help tailoring the best of each to the parameters of the game). If you're short on time but still want to play, Fantasy Flight offers a Beginner's Game that comes with 4 pre-generated characters and an introductory session.

GM Prep Work

I read the beta book cover-to-cover twice in order to familiarize myself with all the mechanics, skills, concepts and basic premises. Once the core rulebook came out, I read that through as well though, at over 400 pages, it took a bit longer than its beta predecessor. It was worth the extra effort to be thorough, as Edge of the Empire is not similar to most other systems commonly being played at present. The fundamental structure of the game was based on the Warhammer 40K RPG, but that's as close a relative as you will find (yes, that includes either of the other Star Wars RPGs, which Edge of the Empire does not resemble aside from the fact that both are set in the Star Wars universe).

I picked up a copy of the Beginner Game primarily because I wanted another set of the narrative dice and the kit was only marginally more expensive than just the dice. My players and I use 2.5 sets of the dice (the half set being some d8s and d12s that the GIR and I converted with the stickers from our beta books), but 2 sets would probably be plenty for a table of four players and a GM. 

All this for only a couple dollars more than the dice

The actual Beginner Game provides some nice scaffolding if, like me, you're new to GMing or you want to familiarize yourself with the system faster. I say scaffolding because I used the adventure in the Beginner Game as just that, stripping out the parts that I thought my players wouldn't care for (like using the pre-generated characters) and adding scenes to make the experience more engaging. It was a nice add-on, but the Beginner Game certainly isn't necessary.

Fantasy Flight offers quite a bit in the way of support for GMs, including this set of free downloadables which features character sheets, more pre-generated characters, and even a 3-act fully written adventure. Perhaps even more useful is the thoughtful, supportive community of players and GMs housed here in the forums. 

Overall Initial Impressions/Observations

This is not a game that easily accommodates large parties. The rulebook recommends tables be no larger than 6 players and I have to agree with that. Our table of four players felt like an ideal size so I imagine that any more than 6 would make it difficult to balance the narrative aspects in such a way that everyone felt like they were a legitimate part of the action.

Some bits of the rules are, at first glance, pretty dense. Specifically, those regulations governing starship combat are difficult to pick up on the fly (I swear that terrible pun was unintentional). The encumbrance dicta are similarly dry, but can be easily modified or even omitted with little appreciable effect. 

Ostensibly, being a fan of Star Wars goes a long way. Yes, there is a section in the rulebook that speaks directly to GMs and players who want to go outside canon and build their own subset of the universe (and good for them!), but, for every kid who ever wanted to pilot a starship or chat with a droid or fight alongside a Wookiee, there is a deep layer of satisfaction. 

Session two is a handful of work days away, so I hope to have more for you all then!

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