25 | January | 2016 | "DESTROY ALL FANBOYS!"

RPB_Jan_2016

Right before that dopey snowstorm landed, I’d gotten a few (okay, a lot of) packages delivered but just now got to opening them up (hey, I was busy moving furniture around for last week’s plastering and painting and was in quite a haze of weariness). So seeing January’s Retro Pop Box peeking out at me from a small stack of packages made me grin somewhat like Mr. Sardonicus after an encounter with a tickle fetish dominatrix. Um, never mind that reference! Anyway, someone at the post office felt it okay to doodle on the box (boo), as my regular carrier was on vacation (Joe always brings my mail right up to the door and doesn’t cram it into the mailbox) and the new guy is a bit goofy because he sometimes puts the wrong mail in a few boxes.

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Inside the box were a nice sticker tribute to David Bowie (who passed away the previous week, so the creator elves were fast on the draw here) and a nice set of 70’s themed items:

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Heh. A nice and exclusive RPB T-shirt that references a key scene from 1978’s Animal House will be worn here in a pants optional mode. Hey, when you get older, you tend to like LESS clothing (and not just on the ladies or whatever). DOn’t ask me to explain this – you’ll hopefully live long enough to experience it yourself. I call it *Freedom!* Whee.

RPB Jan 2016 d

The other stuff was a nice hodgepodge of items. That Space Invaders bag will get shouldered for shopping trips (and has already gotten the thumbs up seal of approval at a local game shop), I do need a tiny shark toy and maybe a tinier toy Jet Ski to go into the tiny Happy Days lunchbox (sorry, Fonzie – that’s the first tribute I thought of, aaaaayyyyyyy!), that Doctor Who journal will require a tiny pencil or pen if it’s to last the 500 years noted on that cover, and I’m wearing that Thing button as I type this just because it’s always Clobberin’ Time somewhere in the world and I need to represent.

Anyway, if your own nostalgia meter is spinning, you know what to do, right?

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Dungelot 0 Another of tinyBuild Games‘ upcoming titles is Dungelot: Shattered Lands from Red Winter, a two man studio based in Russia. Shattered Lands is their third game, but unlike the much maligned Dungelot 2 (which got lots of guff for its micro-transaction heavy gameplay), it’s available on iOS now and coming to Steam later this year as a single player game worth keeping an eye peeled for.

While I’m not a big Minesweeper fan in general, it’s the super cute art style and familiar rogue-like RPG aspects that have my interest piqued. Hey, who doesn’t like loot drops and increasing difficulty? Well, that and it’s got a rather large and unholy cow as a beefy boss that needs to be taken down:

dungelot-shattered-lands-gif Moo! Of course, that means that Cow from Hell above is udderly a female fiend (last time I checked, bulls are udderless), but hey – equality goes as good for evil as it does for good when all is said and done. If that sentence made no sense it’s because I’m still zonked out from the snowstorm we had two days ago. I could use some hot milk right about now, so that bovine behemoth-ess (MOO!) is looking mighty attractive about now.

But I digress. Go pick up the game if you have an iOs whatever to play it on or slap it on your Steam watchlist and go hide in a corner until it appears in that store at some point down the road. Here are some screens to ogle below while I nap through the rest of this post:

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