I was rummaging around my stuff and found my copy of Warmaster, read it a bit on the shitter and realized I would never be able to get anyone I know to play this game despite the rules and the ease of getting into with 10mm miniatures. This reminded me that I had a ton of Epic 40K stuff based about 8 years ago (my god how time flies) and that it was just sitting around un-played since about 2016 or so. Terrible! So I decided to bust it out and start painting and at the same time was looking on Ebay for some pieces I needed and scored a fully painted Tyranid army for a bit of dross. This army is HUGE and so I figured I would get the lads together to do a big game of Epic 40K: three small armies vs a massive Tyranid horde and see how long they can hold out turn wise.
This required painting as I have to supply three of the four armies and so it begins.
RULES
I’ve played almost all the Epic rulesets (not the newest one in the 30K time period) and I am pretty much done with the Adeptus Titanicus/Space Marine 2 ruleset that I used to play in college. It’s too fiddly and the games take too long to play big stuff and Epic is ALL ABOUT THE BIG GAMES. So I was pondering either Epic Armageddon or 1997 Epic 40K and went with the latter– the reason is that the game play is super smooth and I just won’t need to explain all that much. Your detachment adds up it’s firepower in range, rolls on the chart, shit gets killed. Assaults and Fire fights have their own fairly simple rules as well. This way even if we haven’t played in awhile and may have a couple totally new players, it just won’t be tough to learn.
The biggest challenge with Epic 40k is the detachment building as it is completely open compared to other versions of the game. Luckily, these dudes built THIS to help people put together detachments really fast. The interface is a bit fucked up for building an army, but it is a HUGE help to do this. Anyway, here are some pictures of stuff I’m working on for the game. I am a SLOOOWWWWW painter so some of these miniatures I bought. Not my Mentor Legion though, that is all mine (for better or worse for the miniatures).
My first mentor legion vehicle, one of what will be very many Rhinos…
I bought these off a guy in the UK and though in some pieces when they arrived, a super easy fix for each of them.
A Falcon I painted for the LOLS.
This is the entire Tyranid army, painted probably around 2012? It’s had multiple owners since the original artist.
My ‘good start’ on the first Mentor Legion detachment. Trying to find how they are supposed to look has been a tough one, but everything is turning out.
I just finished JA3 after a long time of on and off play. The game is absolutely brilliant, a fantastic homage to JA 1 and 2 and most importantly, the most playable and best Jagged Alliance yet in the modern era after quite a few unfortunate missteps since… 1999. Is this the best and most playable Jagged Alliance game? Read no further if you want the answer TL/DR: Yep!
In the early days of PC gaming, Jagged Alliance was one of the first CD-ROM games that I remember fanatically playing (the other was Holistic Design’s Hammer of the Gods) and my 486 had only a floppy disk! So, in summer of 1995, when I should have been outside running amok after college, I was sitting crouched over my mom’s PC crammed into the dinning room goofing around on the island of Metavira with Biff, Skitz, Reuban and Ivan. I played this A LOT and realized once I moved out of the house, which was just weeks away, I would not be able to play the game without a CD player, something I wouldn’t be able to afford for months. Hence, I played JA for days straight and was completely enthralled by the game, it’s characters and the silly Metavira island.
Core Gameplay
Given some of you may never have played any Jagged Alliance game, I’m going to start off with the game-play which, while a critical piece of what makes JA3 good, is not the most important part of the game compared to other games in the genre (Xcom for example). Jagged Alliance 3 is essentially a party-based RPG with a substantial strategic layer where you manage your team’s non-combat operations, equipment, finances, read emails (!?) and negotiate contracts. In addition to your main character, you hire mercs into your ‘party’ and travel a large map exploring and destroying as you go. Outside of the strategic view, JA3 is real time while exploring until battles begin at which time it switches to tactical turn based combat. Unlike Xcom, Trouble Shooter, and JA: Deadly Games, your party can walk around the map sectors rather than just going on various combat missions and then sitting at home at base.
For the core combat engine, what JA3 brought to the table is a massive improvement of the tried and true skirmish game mechanics of Xcom: Enemy Unknown from 2012. Stripped down to the bare bones, the 2012 Xcom still managed to deliver and extremely satisfying tactical challenge and has been copied by many other games since (just like the 1994 version was). I feel that the JA3 developers were extremely thoughtful in what the added onto the basic Xcom 2012 set of mechanics and got a delicious mix of JA peanut butter in Xcom’s chocolate. I had a blast with Xcom 2012, but I think JA3 is far better in every way.
Instead of just 2 actions per turn, like Xcom, JA’s mercs have action points that they can spend on movement, reloading, shooting, and lying on the ground, et al. This allows the game to have enormous nuance around conditional effects, fatigue and differentiation between different mercs. Buns for example is an extremely slow mover while having the same level of action points for shooting as Dr. Q, who in contrast can run circles around nearly every other merc (and then karate chop them). Mercs can run, walk, duck and lie down on the ground to take cover. They can hide and sneak around, climb and jump of stuff in addition to weapon actions.
Shooting is based on physics, in contrast to Xcom, and a bullet, bomb, mortar, missile or knife is an actual thing in the game world that lands or hits somewhere, regardless of whether or not it hit it’s target. Like having action points, this engenders massive nuance to the game world, where bystanders are hit, bullets can shoot through cover and people, can hit gas tanks and break windows. Every shot does something, even if it’s just kicking up some dirt or sand or in some cases, causing massive explosions!
The nuanced combat engine is a lot to take in at first, and I was a bit worried it was too much complexity, but once you get rolling an take your time through the first island fights, you will come out of it knowing almost everything you need to know to succeed.
Weapons
I would be remiss in any review of a game like this without mentioning the vast weapon selection. There are a LOT of guns in this game and like 6 different types of grenades. All the weapons are circa-mid 90’s like the other tech, so Uzi’s and MP5’s abound. While you can buy weapons from Bobby Ray’s, there are rare and wonderful weapons to be found /looted off the map (and some come with certain mercs) and you are well rewarded for a bit of searching around in corners of the map board.
Each class of weapon has some special thing it can do to differentiate it from the other weapon classes, for example there are run and gun options with submachine guns and extra aim actions with rifles, heavy machine guns need to be set up to fire and have very different mechanics than all other weapons (much like ‘overwatch all the time’). This is another brilliant nuance to the games systems that really gets you thinking tactically about how to arm mercs and how to run them in the field.
Late early game through the mid game, my combo was to have a sneaky close combat fighter, a machine gunner and a couple of snipers to tap out anyone that was exposed. If I had enough mercs, I would have a couple of fast sweepers with grenades and the best automatic rifle I could get to finish things off. There were a few guns I found pretty useless in most situations, so even when you get beyond the starting game crap, there are some traps in the weapons you find (maybe they are more optimal with certain mercs?). Do NOT discount pistols in the mid/late game though, as some of them hit really hard and often at close range. Late game you get all the toys so there are oodles of heavy weapons that will AOE enemies who are then ready for the mop up, also due to ‘hardened’ enemies with heavy armor there are tools to hit them with status effects with gas grenades, flashbangs before getting in on a good shooting.
Map design
The strategic map is HUGE. When I finished the tutorial island I was astounded at the size of the overall map and the fact that every single sector has stuff in it to interact with and the variations of terrain are extremely distinct. There are underground caves, deserts, jungle areas, swamps, semi-mountainous regions and cities that have actual buildings with multiple floors (all of which can get blown apart!). Lots of places have little villages or points of interest and even in the most desolate desert regions there will be a burnt out car or truck or cave region to explore. In this you can get totally lost in the game and forget that you need to make cold hard cash to pay Buns to work with Fox! Cash comes from mines, and since they are the center point for most of the non-set piece battles in the game, each of the mine maps are distinct and create varied tactical challenges. Some mines have lots of buildings, others are in deep pits and others are super open with very little in the way of cover. This is critical to the game as you will be fighting over these areas again and again and again.
Strategic movement is pretty easy once you have access to a port or two, but if not, your mercs have to hoof it across some fairly inhospitable regions.
Story
Without any spoilers, you find yourself embroiled in a multi-faction struggle for economic and political control of an area of Western Africa called Grand Chien (big Dog) which is a fantasy mixture of French post-colonial and German post-WW2 gulash filled with all sorts of wacky characters, funny accents and stuff to shoot at. There are nazis, evil pharmaceutical companies, evil mining companies and rogue mercenaries in addition to the inhabitants who are just trying to get through the day without being shot up. The game starts where you have been hired by the President of Grand Chien’s daughter to enact a rescue of the President who has been captured by a mysterious figure.
Along with the main storyline there are countless side quests and some very strange events that happen (not so strange if you played JA2 though) for this rather hapless part of Africa. While the game is an homage of sorts to JA1 and 2, the story is not derivative, despite quite a few easter eggs from the older games.
Characters and the Mercs!
Ahh the JA characters… this is the meat of the JA franchise and why I feel so hollow sometimes with my faceless soldiers from Xcom and other games in the genre that don’t go this far with their character development. This JA has a huge roster of malcontents to deal with, all with tons of dialog, varied skills and specials and unique weapons and traits. Obviously certain mercs hate each other and others end up trying to do each other all the time, some are perfect pairs with tons of mutual dialog with each other. The hiring and firing and managing your team is a huge part of the game and should not be ignored for efficiency, that just wouldn’t be Jagged Alliance now would it? Not to give any spoilers, but if you have never played, you must start out with both Fox and Buns and ride that rollercoaster to the end.
They could have completely screwed the pooch with this part of the game, but it was fantastic– my only small complaint is that they didn’t get the voice actor for Ice quite right…
Challenge Level
JA3 is a challenging game and while the initial island is a bit of a cakewalk, once you get onto the mainland (a must to start making money) the game can start to get very harsh with constant attacks from various factions and the inability to keep up with threats as well as exploration. One thing to note is that you do not have to hold many sectors to make tons of cash, it can be cool to light up most of the map blue for your control, but it is just not needed. Get a mine quick, plan your attack to get your next mine, scout it out, then get it taken. Train militia (Raider is great for this) and then get rolling out.
Synopsis
JA3 is one of the best computer games I’ve played in a long time and is both homage to the older games and pushing the tactical turn based genre forward in terms of core gameplay, unique character/RPG elements and is damn fun to boot. This game blows Xcom away (as it should more than 10 years later). I cannot recommend this one enough.
2025 gaming is off to a great start after Sunday’s Warcry action. I had been planning this even with folks for a few months, trying to get adult’s schedules to align is quite the challenge afterall and Sunday, it happened. We met up over by Old Guard Games (Napoleon’s 2.0) and they had plenty of table space for a couple of Warcry boards. Two of the players had never played before so the first games were teaching games for the most part and I went through the rules quickly before getting stuck into battle. As I’ve played just under 20 times or so, I have the rules down pretty well overall, but there are always a few niggling edge cases to make rulings on in this type of game anyway. I get blamed a lot for overlooking rules when teaching but it’s ALWAYS some sort of edge case, yet I still get yelled at, but I digress.
The first game was the Untamed Beasts (the OG) vs the newish Black Talons mega hunters which felt like the Teen Titans going up against some Viltrumites. We had a “take out each other’s Daggers” mission and while I thought I would get blown to shit, it was a very close match where my Rocktusks took out the Black Talon elf really quick and nearly took out the crossbow gal as well before my dagger was beaten down by Naeve who is a ridiculous powerhouse (and looks like Anissa the Viltrumite as well…). Great game. I was running double Rock Prowler and had a good time with that list.
uunpainted Neave and the leader of the Untamed Beasts duking it out
Meanwhile the Royal Beastflayers and Rotmire Creed duked it out on a second board. I just got one snap of this one and didn’t get much info except they had some fun and also had nearly the same twist and the same mission as we did.
The third game was a 4 player Tower capture scenario where I busted out my Wildecorps Hunters. Even with 800 points, I was able to field a good force and 4 dogs! This was my first time playing them and strategically I was going to use the dogs to hold down the enemies and then knock the shit out of anyone on the tower with the Arbalester. I had some good rolls there to pop off some enemies but my dogs could not handle the melee meatgrinder near the tower well enough to get the (death grip) grabs. My sweepers that were going to come in and take the tower were wiped out by the boss man of the Royal Beastflayers. In the end, the Beastflayers and the Rotmire Creed decimated each other and the Black Talons tried some of their tricks to teleport to the top of the tower which, despite the fact that Neave Blacktalon was taken out of the game by a TRIPLE 6 ROLL from the Rotmires, one of their meaties climbed to the top of the tower and won them the game. They are really tough to take out and Neave’s move 7 makes them challenging to deal with on missions where the rest get outmaneuvered by chaffffffff.
Painting
I painted pretty furiously in the last week to get my last 6 models done for the Untamed Beasts. This included a few models that I really didn’t need (2 extra plainsrunners) that I had put together to make a silly mostly plainsrunners list at one point. I think the Untamed Beasts have a lot of solid options but my superstars are the Rocktusk prowlers, which I procrastinated a long time to paint as I’m traditionally not good at horses/animals. When I finally did, they turned out great except that when I varnished them they got frosted IN WINTER. I have no idea at first how this happened except that my brush might have been too wet with water to start the process, and when I mixed the batch up of varnish to paint on, the water got trapped in the recesses. Later I realized that I had used Lamia Medium rather than Contrast Medium by mistake, so that frosting was the medium and NOT trapped water. I tried olive oil and gloss coating them again, and neither worked, so I had to reshade various areas and it worked out OK, not perfect, but what is?
All in all, a great day of Warcry, one of GW’s best games and it made the work of putting together and painting all that terrain worth while. Now that I’ve finished my Beasts, it’s time to get back to the terrain painting… ugh.
We get a lot of remakes, Roller Ball, Total Recall, Planet of the Apes. Many of them are jack shit and should have probably gone straight to DVD / Streaming. With Nosferatu, we got a real good one. It’s been a very, very long time since I’ve seen the original, which I do not think I’ve seen in it’s entirety ever, just caught parts when it was on TV as a kid mostly not changing the channel out of curiosity (like when Metropolis would be on).
I’m not a film critic and mostly like trash movies, but the cinematography was amazing, the set design, costume design and atmosphere was spot on. Acting was superb from everyone. Pacing is critical in this type of film and Nosferatu is a long film at around 2 hours. Knowing the story pretty well, it took a long time during the middle of the film to get the conclusion started, but when it got rolling, the payoff was well worth it. Apparently there is going to be a longer version at some point, likely with a bit more in the beginning of the story.
The real star of this was Depp’s kid, who knocked it out of the park. She had a really challenging role combining what looked like early Olivia Hussey with Isabel Adjani (not just the seizure scenes but acting as well). I’ve only seen her in The King with Chalemet and Pattison (great movie) so she was basically an unknown to me –and rocked it. I don’t know if it was on purpose, but she looked like Olivia Hussey.
The other star was the design of the vampire which is slowly revealed throughout the film. It’s a must see just for that if nothing else. Unlike the horror of the Lighthouse, The Northman and the Witch, Nosferatu is pretty tame on the gore and nudity. While it has tits in it a couple of times, I’d say it’s not too bad of a film for kids over 13. Otherwise, it’s a movie that everyone should see.
Ah it’s Xmas break and I get to write about games that I liked and put a picture of Rebecca Bagnol yet again as by far the undisputed hottest chick on the entire planet. But first, the less important stuff, the games of the year and film, and books.
Board Games
For 2024 Arcs takes the prize but definitely not the base game, which is just goofing around with mechanics compared to the full game with Blighted Reach. The only reason to play Arcs base game is to prepare you for either a one off or campaign game with the expansion. I am only three games in (full game that is) and I’m loving it. The gamespace with the imperials and the Fates is crazy, there is REAL negotiation which Oath was completely missing, you are not at each others throats from turn 1 and may well work together to meet each other’s goals, as long as you are getting farther ahead in power than the other player. Can’t wait to play more.
Video Games
2024 was a bit soft on the video game front compared to 2023, which had a ton of great games. This year there are two that stand out above the rest (that I had time to play). I’m getting a bit older and I just sort of want to play the stuff I know well with some exceptions. Give me Quake 3 and the original MOO and I’ll be… almost happy. That said, as predicted when it came out, my favorite single player game of 2024 was far and away UNICORN OVERLORD. I’m not even completely done with the game but it has been my go to for car trips and plane rides and sitting around time on the Switch (which my kids finally got tired of playing on after years of never seeing the thing). The art, the theme, the combat, the food porn and the incredibly depth you can go to equipping and setting the ‘programming’ for your battle groups makes Ogre Battle fanatics like myself blush with joy. That game and ‘Soul Nomad and the World Eaters’ paved the way to Unicorn Overlord being one of my favorite games in that genre, despite the fact that the main two characters are straight out of every generic anime game. I am a horny old goat, so the subtle (compared to Dragon’s Crown) and in some cases hilarious naughtiness of the female character’s outfits and bouncy/swaying just pushes this over the edge into fantastic land in addition to the hilarious food porn sequences. Vanillaware just went to 11 on the tactical and artistic aspects of this game. Overall, a total package that I will be playing for a long time.
Unicorn Overlord is a single player game though, and does not really encompass the full joy of personal computer or console gaming with frenemies. For 2024, the most excellent, frustrating and deep multiplayer game goes solidly to Solium Infernum.
SI is fundamentally Fantasy Flight’s Warrior Knights but taken to 11 in complexity with way, way too many options to even conceptualize into any coherent strategy as a new player. Yet with more plays, the daemonic flower of this game opens up and it is a thing of beauty and madness extraordinaire. I’m going to do a review of the game on here so I won’t wax and tax much more until then, but like Armello (by the same developers), this is a very strong PC Computer “board game” style game, made even better by having tick-based turns (where everyone turns in their turns to the server and then it runs the turns with the orders all in). It’s pretty fun to play against the AI, but they will lay a beat down on you if you don’t know how to play, which I appreciate greatly as it helps vs human players more than a poofter AI.
over time, you learn to whip the AI’s ass, even though it seems to cheat, which is fitting really.
Movies
This is so obvious it’s barely worth mentioning as it’s DUNE 2 for sure. I went to see it three times in the theater and it held up every time. I liked Terrifier 3 and the new Mad Max movie quite a bit, but neither hold a candle to the DUUUUUUNNNE. The first one had some dialog problems here and there that annoyed me, a few times the characters spoke a bit too 1990’s if that makes sense rather than ten thousand years in the future. I didn’t notice this much at all in the second installment. The key things for Dune 2 to pull off were the battle scenes and man they knocked those out of the park.
Books
I got stuck on a few books this year, mistakenly starting off the year with the poorly written Gideon the Ninth which I got for my daughter to read and wanted to check it out first. I barely finished and she set it aside after about 100 pages. I then went on to the excellent and horrifying ‘Thirty Years War’ by Wedgwood, then THE TERROR, which was probably the best book I’ve read in a long time. Give it a go (it’s better than the show, which was also quite good).
I re-read Good Night, My Sweet by Jim Thompson before starting Confessions of an Economic Hit-man, which is a solid read but really could use a complete rewrite. It reads like a self help book a bit with addons and addons and addons rather than a cohesive text. The core ideas and accounts are important enough to push through the whole thing. You can learn why so many countries despise the United States.
RPG
Tabletop RPG wise I only played /ran Dungeon Crawl Classics this year and I have no regrets! I ran Beneath the Well of Brass twice (followed up by Temple Siege) and in my kid’s campaign, the great little crime module from the Lankhmar line: No Small Crimes. Well of Brass is a great starter module as it has a lot of chances for a TPK, but if those are avoided it’s not super deadly.
FLUX AI
I spanned a lot of time learning FLUX and COMFYUI: how to write prompts, build out LORAs and generally do silly as things with it. Now in a pinch I could whip out an advertising campaign for just about anything with photos in about 2 days or less of jagging around with it. Of course, I’m using it for stupid stuff such as the following:
We’ve known this for about a year, but there was still skepticism around the project really having legs with Sega. Recently, that has changed and VF6 in all it’s glory is happening. This will make our current decade of tons of amazing fighting games go from very good to the best decade ever.
Why is Virtua Fighter the best if you’ve never played:
3 buttons – the game is easy for new players to pick up (for most characters– not Akira)
Insane character depth: even though the game has a smaller roster than other fighting games, players can play characters in such radically different ways that it just doesn’t matter, you will face a different Akira almost every time you play vs human players
There are no tiers. I’ve seen tier lists based on tournament wins, but then the next one it’s completely different based on which characters players want to play, so if you decide on a character to main, you can have confidence that you will be able to be successful if you put the work in.
EVERYONE HAS COMMAND THROWS (and they are awesome)
I’ll likely be writing a lot on this as more information comes to light, but C-Money has some thoughts on critical system design/characters.
Despite her pop-star looks and elecro-chick-pop start that one of my kids liked– Poppy couldn’t help herself and it looks like she has put out another full on nu-Metal style album.
Out in mid-November, the singles that have dropped have been super heavy and right on the mark for the direction Poppy should always go.
Ah the Marvel Heroes FASERIP game from the 80’s, the Superhero game we should have been playing as kids instead of Champions and TMNT– well maybe not TMNT, that deserved roll in the hay or three. While I haven’t played the FASERIP rules in several years, I developed a short campaign for it awhile back but never had the players go for it (and I got lazy and just ran DCC). The version we played was the retroclone called FASERIP by Gubintroll Games and came out in 2015. It was great BUT had one major issue– compatibility with all the Marvel Heroes stuff (and there is a LOT) from the 1980’s and early 90’s. Self-contained, it was a blast and I loved the push your luck character generation system, there just wasn’t anything out for the system to pick up and play, so while we played it, I jetted over to the older game.
Why would you want this when there are so many other Superhero games on the market? If you haven’t tried it the Marvel Heroes game where FASERIP came from is excellent, and is by far the most OSR superhero game (rulings over rules) AND has the only meta-currency (karma) outside of Japanese RPG games that makes sense. FATE and other games got their bennies and chips from FASERIP, but IMO, FASERIP does a better job with it than it’s children. Give it a spin, generate some randos and go to town!
