@Justin – but this scene you talked about has such a lovely song:

Christmas time is once a year.
Every critter holds it dear.
Every animal big or small,
Christmas means so much to us all.
It’s once a year, it’s Christmas time!
And it happens once a year.
It’s once a year, it’s Christmas time!
When we hear about how Christmas only comes
Once a year.

🙂

Anyone else getting a green screen?

Does anyone remember ‘Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura’ from 2001 by Troika Games?

@warzan. As to the scaling of water. I think if your looking for generic sea scape the beauty of water is that you can get away with one water scape that works at all scales. I have used the same water for 1/6000th naval right up to 1/350th it still looks right. The thing that gives it scale is the land and so you just need to get that scale right. However the biggest issue is the colour of the water. if you look at Google earth you can see lots of different colours. shallow water is different from deep… Read more »

On the Steampunk thing… I have never actually got into this…but from a scientific point of view an Nuke power station is essentially a new efficient steam engine…so its actually happened guys

When it comes to Steampunk, I’m not sure why a divergent history isn’t used more. For example, what if World War 1 occurred in 1864 instead of 1914, or if the South beat the North in the American Civil War. As wars tend to spurn a technological arms race, this would provide amply areas for exploration. Crimson Skies (not steampunk but a pulp 30s game) used this to good effect with the Spanish Flu pandemic after WW1 causing the fragmentation of the US. From that we get airships, crazy planes and sky pirates. Could we not also change the location?… Read more »

Was having a chat to my wife a couple of days ago about a Firefly reboot. Thought it would be great to have a new series based around the Serenity instead of the crew. They could explore before Mal ended up with her. As much as I love the crew it’s the universe and setting that deserves to be explored more 🙂

Going back to the issue of making sense of some simulator games. The one that always makes me smile are the Driving simulators in amusement arcades at Motorway service stations. Just what you need to put you in the right frame of mind before you get back behind the wheel for another 4 hours

My idea for a Steampunk world would start where a comet/asteroid hits the Earth and the power-nations all rush out, spending millions to get to the crash-site first to havest the new resources, only to find that the asteroid is just a big rock. No new elements and nothing to be gained. So they return to their countries which are now all nearing bankrupcy, so development of the combustion engines/jet engines etc never happened, so a game could be based during the modern day, but using Steampunk settings as the world and civilisations never developed and progressed out of the… Read more »

Anyone who knows their PC game history knows that it should be a Llama simulator rather than goat!

Regarding Warren’s idea about a beach assault for Drop Zone Commander: Here it South Florida, we are famous (some would say infamous) for our towering condos, hotels, and high-rent apartment buildings RIGHT on the water. In a setting like this, you could have the beach assault but still use all the great buildings and rules that seem to be a key element of DZC. It also opens up murderous fields of fire right down onto the beach, but at the same time, these tall buildings are desperately vulnerable themselves (mostly glass in order to offer those great ocean views).

Thanks guys for lightening up my sunday morning 🙂

On the subject of brains in jars, I watched Frankenstein’s Army last night, good shout from you guys a few weeks ago. The wife joined me halfway through and at the end said, What was that?!? She really had NO clue what was going on 🙂

T-Minus 6 days to Photobomb o’clock…..

I remember about 13 years ago when I was introduced to steampunk, through a game called Arcanum: magic and steam or something, I don’t remember anything about an element X or J or whatever, just good old steam and engineering, plus it included magic, really good game and setting as i remember it.

If someone hasn’t mentioned it already, Guild of Harmony have a Steampunk version of Ghostbusters Ray Stantz, that’s very cool 🙂

Just a thought on the DZC comments at the beginning of the episode. Back to the Future II, everyone knows that hover boards don’t work well over water.

Steamboy, the movie. An inventor makes a super-compact steam generator and the plot is like the rocketeer, but with steam machines of all sizes. I don’t know if it’s called something different in the UK.

On the subject of “what is new in Steampunk” … not sure if this qualifies as steampunk, but “War of the Worlds: Goliath” postulated what might happen if the “Martians” of H.G. Wells came back after 15 years for a second invasion in 1914. Basically, we’ve had a look at alien tech for 15 years now (after all the original Martians got sick and died in our ecosystem) and our own tech is now much more advanced. The backstory postulates tension between the nations of the world banding together to fight a second invasion with 1500-foot airships, huge biplane aircraft… Read more »