Vanessa Atalanta OOG Discussion

Late last year we saw the Vanessa Atalanta trilogy draw to a close. As a group of players we've followed the characters through abductions, nightmares, strange ministries, werewolf cults, first dates, chase scenes, and body snatchings - now the Puppet Master for the series is calling us together to discuss the game and, I imagine, find out whether we actually did destroy the Flower of Life with those salts, or whether we should have just burned the shop down and been done with it!

Last night I recieved the following message:

Go here http://chat.efnet.org/irc.cgi?chan=%23yourchannel

put in a nickname

under the channel tab click other and put in #Vanessa

Click Login – I’ll be there at 21:30 GMT – see you there!

thanks

Paul

Paul asked me to post the info here in the hope that people will drop in and give their opinions on how the game went, ask questions to the PM, or even just to learn about the game itself from scratch. So, if you are interested, head over to the link above at 21:30 GMT and chat with us. I'll be there, certainly, lets just hope I don't get kicked out, my computer fizz and begin to smoke and I hear the Greenwich pips...

UnFiction thread for the latest game is here: 15DD Thread.

Wikias for the three games are here: Vanessa Atalanta - Ministry of Argon - Fifteen Days of Darkness.

A Trained ARG Soldier

After New Year I have come to the realisation that playing too many alternate reality games has turned me into a Cluedo/post-it note game genius. I think it must be all the mind bendingly difficult puzzles, all the late nights staring at cryptic pictures trying to piece together strands of information to gather up a story, but over the past few days I have been a fully functional criminal mastermind.

I went up to my friend's parents hotel as planned, nice journey and its always good to spend time with old friends. Sarah, the friend who was hosting the party had decided (last minute) to add a "murder mystery" theme to the proceedings and so I was armed with my ornate dagger letter opener Swatts had brought back from Venice for me, and I was ready to put my puzzlebox to the test.
The first night was the 30th, the party proper wasn't starting till the night of the 31st (as is customary for New Years eve parties I believe), so we just drank a ridiculous amount of alcohol and played board games. As the night wore on we descended from a pretty intense game of Monopoly (which I still managed to lose, even after getting hotels on Park Lane and Mayfair!) down to the game where you have a post-it note on your forehead and you have to guess who you are. I managed to get my person in 3 guesses! Booyah! Are they male? Yes. Are they over the age of 30? Yes. Are they the Principal of our old college? Yes - you dick.

The next evening was the party itself, Sarah passed around bowls with 3 different categories written on strips of paper - one bowl for names, one for items and one for locations. Now, after we had picked out our three selections, we were informed that in order to "survive" to the end of the weekend, we would have to kill each other off. It was an interesting move for a party, murder, and it certainly put us all on edge! The idea was that we would have to brutally bludgeon our "mark" with our designated "murder weapon" in the location we were assigned, and so their assassination target would pass to us. The person with the most murders to their name by the end of the weekend would be the winner. We were told this at dinner, and I can tell you - noone would accept ANYTHING from anyone else for the rest of the evening: "Hey Sam, pass me the salt", "Oh, I bet you'd love that wouldn't you - here I am passing the salt and then BAM, I'm lying salted in the gutter, dehydrated to death - I'm watching you..."

My mark was my friend Becky, and my weapon was to be a mobile phone - easy freaking peasy. Unfortunately, I picked a freaking doozy of a location. Off the hotel grounds. By the time I found this out it was already well past dark, and I'm not sure how my friend would feel about me luring his girlfriend down into the night in order to murder her with a mobile phone. I had to bide my time, but also, I had to keep an eye open because someone would have picked out my name, and would be baying for my blood! And to make matters worse, Becky was being super-paranoid about it, she wouldn't even accept a sparkler from me - asking that I put it down on the step so she could pick it up!

As the evening wore on, friends were picked off, girlfriend was taken out by a shoe wielded by my friend Ed. She didn't mind, it meant he had to deal with her mark, which was to somehow take out a guy she'd never met with a book. Ed didn't get very far with that either, no sooner had he killed the girl, then he was assassinated by Rob and his oh-so-mightier-than-a-sword pen, in the girls toilet - no less. We decided not to enquire as to why Ed and Rob were hanging out in the girl's loos. Ditt fell foul to a box of biscuits, Shirley to a teacup and Josh was powerless against Sam's pringles tube. But I persevered. In fact, I made it till the morning - the fresh morning air had never smelled so sweet! I didn't even mind that it was infused with the smell of 4 twenty-something guys all sleeping in sleeping bags and exuding noxious gasses - I was alive! Now to enact my dastardly plan:

Little Big Planet Awesomeness

Probably my last post for a couple of days now, I'm heading up to the frozen norths for New Years Eve. My friend's parents bought a hotel up there a couple of years back, its a gigantic 20s style boutique hotel, lots and lots of creepy looking rooms, perfect for hide and seek... of course you can play hide and seek when you're 23! What do you mean I'm a grown man with facial hair? That doesn't proclude my participation in espionage based children's games! Regardless, last year myself and a bunch of friends headed up there, through wind, hail and dense snow and partied the night away.

So, tomorrow my friends are coming to pick my car-less ass up and we are going to brave the M6, all the way up to the lakes for more drunken revelry. So I shan't be back until the 1st, don't miss me too much!

In other news, my brother got me a sweet sackboy figure for Christmas:

 
And he reliably informed me that LBP2 is out early in the new year! Ooooh yeah!



This trailer gives me the tickles down in my belly, I LOVE this game, its so... childish, carefree and most of all its simple. Its just a sidescrolling platformer, but its such a damn good sidescrolling platformer that there is so much more you can do with it!

I have to admit, in my LBP level making career I only made one level of any note (and thats because the girl went on holiday for 3 weeks to Korea and, well, what else am I supposed to do except spend 6 hours a day constructing a masterpiece?) but, if you're interested in checking it out, my PS3 gamer tag is: "DistilledWill" - look me up!