GriffCrier News Feed

Wizards of the Coast has announced D&D Next, the successor to D&D 4th Edition aimed squarely at unifying the game's fractured fan base. My gaming group is practically a case study for 5th Edition -- we played 2nd Edition, 3rd Edition (both flavors), and 4th Edition, but finally gave up on the game when the group couldn't agree on which vers […]

The Blackrazors’ annual holiday hiatus will come to an end in a hail of laser fire and missile explosions as we play A Call to Arms: Noble Armada. The Fading Suns-themed successor to Mongoose Publishing’s Babylon 5: A Call to Arms starship battle is fast, fun and often brutal. It faithfully recreates Wrath of Khan-style slugfests between ships of the line, w […]

It's been mighty quiet around here at Nuketown, partly because I've been super busy at work, but mostly because I've been slowly working on the redesign. My current task is converting the design comps into an HTML/CSS compliant layout. After that, I'll turn those pages into a functional Drupal 7 theme. The challenge has been that going wi […]

It’s been a while, but the recent A:CM traffic from E3 has got my Alien saliva flowing. First thing’s first – check out the new trailer: Just a little tease, but so sexy!! […]

I finally got to spend some time with my new Rock Band 3 Pro Guitar controller last night. While it is certainly not a real guitar, it translates surprisingly well – even for someone who actually plays guitar.  There are a few little niggling differences. The strings are all the same width, which sometimes makes […]

We meet again, reader! After a short hiatus, I began to miss writing and decided to bring SCB back up on a new (read: free) hosting service.  Hopefully, I’ll have some interesting things to share, and I highly encourage everyone reading to comment and participate! Please excuse the broken image links in legacy posts.  Many […]

Tau Zero is one of those books that I had always meant to read, but never really got around to it. It recently came up (somewhere) and I remembered how I had wanted to add it to my collection, but this time decided to do something about it. Book acquired, I set down to read it.This book, like a lot of Poul Anderson’s work, comes from a different era of SF: t […]

Following on the heels of Marsbound by Haldeman, I read Starbound as soon as I was done with the previous book. As this is a sequel, it was a logical course of action...In Marsbound, we discover intelligent life on Mars, life that was bio-engineered to be the mouthpieces of an advanced alien civilization based on silicon-oxides and existing in a sort of cryo […]

The name Haldeman should be a familiar one to Sci-Fi literature fans: he wrote the widely regarded The Forever War. Winning the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards (source), this book was as much about Vietnam as it was about SF, cleverly using the plot device of time dilation to illustrate the alienation of soldiers returning home from war.Marsbound is a somewhat […]

Occasionally in the build process you come to a point where you have to wonder about the effort of moving on, and what is needed.The Tamiya kit stands here, half completed. The roadblock is that the interior looks more challennging than I had first estimated. I'm not thinking that I will need to pick up the Eduard set for this kit, if for no other reaso […]

Accepted into service in 1951, the ASU-57 was an attempt by the Soviets to develop an airborne, air-droppable light AFV to support Soviet Airborne forces. While the 57mm Ch-51 cannon was more effective in the anti-tank role than the 76.2 D-56T cannon then arming the PT-76 tanks, it would stilll have had trouble dealing with heavier tanks and the like. In add […]

The SdKfz.251 was the standard armored personnel carrier for the German Army in WWII. Compared to its closest competitor (the US M3 half-track), it had better armor protection, but poorer cross-country mobility. Interestingly, while many countries experimented with the APC concept -- such as Italy and Japan -- none deployed them in the numbers the US or Germ […]