Category: Whatever

06/16/13

Origins Announces Award Winners

Straight from the show, here are last night’s winners of the 2013 Origins Awards, with the press release from GAMA:

COLUMBUS, OH (June 15, 2013) The Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design is proud to announce the winners for the 39th Annual Origins Awards.
The Origins Awards are presented annually by the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design to recognize outstanding achievement in design and production of games and game-related products.
The winners were voted on by attendees at the Origins Game Fair in Columbus, OH on June 12th – June 16th from the nominees in each category chosen by retailers at the GAMA Trade Show. The winners were announced at the Origins Awards Ceremony on the evening of Saturday, June 15th.
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06/16/13

Origins 2013 – Some Highlights

By Brant Guillory, 15 June 2013

The Lighting-Fast Run Through Origins 2013

Seven hours.  Yep – seven.  That’s all I had to cram in as much of Origins as I possibly could.  I had one day, a press pass, a borrowed digital camera, and Bayonet Jr in tow, and it was a mad dash through a pretty freakin’ big game convention.  Plenty more pictures will follow, but I wanted to start with some highlights…

Collins Epic Wargames

We highlighted one of their upcoming expansions in a recent GARPA column, and the Frontline General game is the cornerstone of Byron’s line.  But he was also showing off a sci-fi minis game with a nifty little command mechanic.

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Byron Collins working hard

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Frontline General in the foreground, and sci-fin minis coolness (Polyversal) in the background

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05/21/13

Birds Make Terrible Dive Bombers

Author: Jim Zabek

Mankind has been inspired by birds for as long as we could appreciate their ability to fly. We have marveled at their ability to take off on a moment’s notice, soar effortlessly through the sky, and alight somewhere that we could never aspire to climb. Nature, fantastic and wonderful, has managed to perfect through evolution some fantastic creatures.

Mankind, always inventive, seems determined to take that evolutionary perfection and improve it to his own ends. Nowhere could this be more obvious than during the Cold War, when the CIA concocted a brilliant scheme to teach cats to spy on people. The idea was simple: surgically implant a microphone and transmitting device inside of a cat, then teach that cat to walk up to a suspected pair of people having a suspect conversation, and Presto! The purrrfect eavesdropping device. Operation Acoustic Kitty was born.
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05/15/13

The Significance of Airpower

Author: Jim Zabek

Airpower in warfare has been employed for over a century. Examples of its use go back as far as the American Civil War, where hot air balloons were used for aerial reconnaissance. The First World War saw an expansion of role of aircraft, and the typical roles that aircraft play in combat were largely defined during that conflict. Fighters, bombers, interceptors, and reconnaissance aircraft all emerged during World War One. But it was during the Second World War that airpower evolved from being a part of combined arms operations to being a fully-fledged combat arm of its own, capable of tipping the scales of battle on its own.

Dauntless-at-midway
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