Author: littlemute

Torchlight 2 info

From PC Gamer (is this an online only mag now?) and what looks to be the official website here.

This is my favorite quote: “I think it’s probably important to mention here that we’re not aiming with our multiplayer to provide the perfectly secure, cheat free MMO multiplayer experience. The idea here is that you can play Torchlight with your friends, and you can modify that if you want to make the game with your friends all the better.”

That said, they could get some Zyel up in there!

For the nerds

Penny Arcade and some various others have actually recorded (and presumably took the time to edit) sessions of their D&D playing to offer up on wizards.com as podcasts.  I have listened to about 10 minutes of one and it’s exactly what you’d imagine– cracking jokes that only the people sitting around the table will understand, and then beating these jokes to death over the span of time– with a little gaming thrown in for good measure.  Here is the link. I’m not sure what to think of this– it seems like something you’d want to bash your head in with a rock rather than sit through, but I figured this is a chance for my wife to listen to Will Wheaton play D&D for all that’s worth.

Interview about the Ravenloft

ravenloft STUFF
Look at all the shit you get in the box!

A rather bland, but telling interview about the upcoming D&D board game series.  I really do not believe the R&D story about just ‘wanting to do it.’   I think it came down to marketing saying “we must compete with Descent.”  Regardless, I’m stoked these are coming out as the last good D&D-Heroscapesque board game released in the USA was…never?

Getting in on a good shootin'

And the (going insane from having a second kid) western obsession continues unabated.  While I have GW’s Legends of the Old West, I’ve been hunting around for another set of gunslinging rules to check out that had a bit more detail to the stat line.  Having checked out Savage Worlds and found it fairly muddy in the rules department, it was time to look elsewhere.   Many moons back, Wargames Foundry founder Bryan Ansell wrote a set of free rules called the Rules With No Name, but they were in such an ‘alpha’ version that I didn’t bother taking them seriously.  Foundry has revised, completed and put them all into a beautiful hardback book that I just accidentally ordered.  Members of my erstwhile gaming group– prepare yourselves for some miniature mayhem.  With paint being slapped on pewter between changing diapers and cleaning up milksplosions, the entire ERTL cow town 1/64 scale building set coming in the mail, and a new sandy-beige bolt of felt slapped across the 4′ X 4′ gaming table– high noon is coming for all of us.

Anyone get up inside the Starcraft yet?

I’m going with a co-worker to watch him pick up the collector’s edition over lunch.  It’s an exciting day for a lot of gamers.  While I’m not concerned that Starcraft will be another high watermark in the RTS genre–I would be very concerned whether or not the gamers of today care about RTS much at all.  The last really good RTS that pushed the envelope for me was Company of Heroes, with Dawn of War being a lesser but moderately OK version.  Both of these games stood on the shoulders of the amazing Warcraft 3, for which I have no limit to the amount of adoration or praise: for it’s gamplay, single player as well as single-handedly moving the genre away from the domination of the defense (like Total Annihilation or Age of Empires) other than that?  The genre has been rather meh.

The question is, will Starcraft 2 be big just because it’s Blizzard or will it be able to sustain the casual gamers?  Warcraft 3 had Ancients and the Hero mods for players that didn’t just want to go online and get their ass slapped aside in multiplayer, but due to the lack of heroes, Starcraft may not have the branches for modification Warcraft 3 does.

For me, sadly, having very little time to commit to learning another RTS to the level I feel comfortable with, Starcraft 2 is all about the single player which, if Warcraft 3 was any indication, will be absolutely brilliant on all fronts.

Gratuitous Space Battles getting a campaign

What we’ve all been waiting for since playing the demo of Gratuitous Space Battles (or longer if you played Strange Adventures in Infinite Space) is a campaign wrapper– and it’s coming according to the developers blog!  Though it doesn’t look like it’s currently planned, the best thing about it is that GSB could work multiplayer.  Unlike Master of Orion 2 and the like, the campaign wrapper for GSB would be playable as a multiplayer game because you don’t control the battles themselves: only the set up.

The main issue with all turn-based strategy games is that battles (even CIV) take so long that players that are not involved are off playing some other game by the time it gets back to their turn.  Dominions and Ultracorps (and many other games) solved this by having tick based turns, i.e.: you put your orders in and at a set time, all player’s orders are executed and the new turn begins.   Without this, multiplayer turn-based strategy games with battles simply doesn’t work due to time constraints.  The way GSB has been developed, players can execute their turns, submit and after the next turn starts, they can watch each of their battles unfold.  I may be getting ahead of myself here, as a large grain of salty skepticism needs to be applied to any Space 4X game since MOO3’s cascade of space pysse into my open mouth– the GSB campaign could suck a giant turd straight from the ass of Prosthetic Vogon Jeltz.  That said, I’m going to get the full version of GSB to push some cash to the developers who may have our best interest in mind–and you should too.

Upping the nerd level

Having a second kid is not quite the mega-shock as the first one, but it doesn’t leave any time for anything at all.  Given my 2 hours per day during my paternity that I’m not chasing after a 2 year old,  I didn’t have  a lot of time at all to read or do anything but sleep, and basically went insane about 4 days ago, pretty much right according to plan.    That said, I busted out some Foundry Old West miniatures that had been sitting on my painting table for well over a year as a means, in half hour stints, to do something other than housework and child-care.  As frustrating and tedious the hobby of painting small toy soldiers is, it really is a relaxing way to span productive time.  You sit, look out a window for a little while, lay some paint, look at it, mix up some blends, look out the window, etc.  Most of my work life is collaborative work, essentially getting other people to actually talk to each other to collaborate, and so working on a project all alone with a tangible, physical result (not a UT3 level or web page) is a bonus to the relaxation.  Oh, yeah, now with 16 Old West miniatures complete as of today, I might actually be able to rope some people in to playing–that is if I can find some terrain.

Here are some shots of the figs.  For my true 28 and 25mm miniatures, I have been entirely influenced by Kevin Dallimore’s 3-color layering method.  I don’t recommend this on the giant 32mm (Games Workshop/ Rackham) at all, but for 25-28MM it is an awesome and effective approach as well as being forgiving if your eyes are not what they used to be.

The Town Drunk
With every batch of miniatures (I usually work on 3-5 at a time) there is one that I don’t spend much time on– just throw paint on and see what happens.  I thought the town drunk would be the one in this group, but it undoubtably was not– I love this model– the face has oodles of Marx bro’s character to it and the stance is just plain silly.  I made the suit all one color– I wanted him to seem very dirty but with some fine clothes on–turned out fairly well.

The Kid
This one is another great stance and face.  I made the mistake of making his hat and cravat green, and his suspenders red at first–and then I dubbed him the Xmas kid–I can’t tell you how many times I’ve made the mistake of combining those two colors.  I changed the hat to black and that solved it.

The Apache
This dude is the badass of the set and I spent the most time on him for sure.  Worked on the pearl handle for his pistol and really worked the flesh in the face to get that scar to show.  All and all a great model to paint.

The Whore
This was a fixed up paint job as I fucking DROPPED the model a few years ago and haven’t really painted since. Getting this one to look nice and get the base redone was key.  I think she turned out pretty well.  Proportionally though, 25-28mm scale doesn’t do well with the female form…

My wife mentioned that she would put miniature gamers lower on the nerd scale than even LARP’ers.