Given that Blood Rage hasn’t arrived yet it’s tough to back another CMON kickstarter so quickly, but The Others is looking like something special (and another Studio McVey, Eric Lang, Adrian Smith collaboration).
There was a HUGE poster for the game at Gencon 2014 but little else since and very little at Gencon 2015 so I thought it might be in limbo, but the kickstarter starts on Sept 10th. If you are fan of Eric Lang’s work (Chaos in the Old World, Blood Rage), this is one to check out for sure. Likely the price of entry will be about 80$, but because it’s kickstarter and you will get all the stretch goals when it gets funded, you may get double that in retail value (like Blood Rage).
Here’s a vid where Lang talks about it.
Here’s the piece of art that piqued my interest about the game at Gencon.
I haven’t been posting for awhile, sort of the end of summer, after Gencon blogging blues (and I’ve been playing a lot of Planetary Annihilation to boot). As penance, click the broad and it will take you to an interesting iOS game I’ve been looking at picking up. After the fun for 20 minutes but ultimately totally boring Fallout Shelter came out, I’ve been looking for a good 4X game in that style and I found it! That’s the subject of a different post altogether.
It came out when? Like 3 years ago? So this is not a big deal except it was accompanied by my barely 5 year old son.
Needless to say, this is one of the best games for little kids of the TV variety. It scales the challenges and clearly marks when things are going to get nasty so the kids know that they are in for some bastardo level design when they go inside one of the cat levels.
The humor is brutal and ridiculous. As the plot is a ruined theatre that has cartoon prisoners run through a series of death traps to the joy of an audience of fat-ass cats, it can’t be taken to seriously. Yet, while it’s goofy, the level of violence can be offputting for very small kids (like 2). By age 3 or so they will love the potty humor and especially the between act movies. One of the characters shits himself to death and the kids love that best of all. They sing the songs, they talk like the narrator and it’s great– you just have to get past that it’s a ruined theatre that has cartoon prisoners run through death traps constantly. At first my son would cry when he would lose (a cat level), but now days he just puts on his “LET’S FUCKING DO IT AGAIN” face.
While drastically different from Castle Crashers, BBT is amazing in it’s own right and does so many things dead on for a platformer. As a kid that was once so addicted to MEGA MAN that he gave up the chance of a hand job and the ability to cop a feel for a bit (age 15, so that was a HUGE fucking deal), I found the size of the guys on the screen and the overall aesthetic to be a great homage.
There was a WTF with everyone I mentioned it to that there was no TSR-style castle for D&D at Gencon, and yet there were many books around and certainly people were playing it. Needless to say, people are playing it outside of gencon a great deal. There’s going to be a point soon where people stop calling it 5E, and just call it D&D.
We’ve stayed away from the march of the splat books, the new character classes, new spells, all that stuff. It’s thrown some people for a loop. But what we’ve seen is a very strong response to the game overall. People seem happy with it. That’s always good.
Master of Orion is a masterpiece of strategy gaming. The second one was fairly good too, but the first for it’s clean design and minimalist micromanagement was top drawer. Many teams have tried to build a better MOO and all have failed because whenever I play them, I just want to go play MOO instead. This excludes the boardgame ECLIPSE, which is the perfect MOO game that isn’t on a computer.
So it’s 2015 and the bad bad bad taste of Master of Orion 3 is probably washed out of most of our mouths and anuses and there is an announcement by the World of Tanks people that they are doing a new MOO game. All I can say is GOOD LUCK. They are going to need it. How many have tried since 1994 and failed? So many… so many…
Well it was busy and fairly drunk with a lot of Lamentations of the Flame Princess played. I’m tired as shit this evening on account of steve’s snoring Sunday morning. My god it was like a constant fart noise for 2 hours from his fucking MOUTH. We should bring a portable CPAP machine to stick on people that fucking snore during gencon– there is SO LITTLE TIME TO SLEEP in the first place. Since it was all burgers and sugar and beer and lack of sleep I’m going to need that XXXXXXL they are always sold out of.
I liked this year’s con. I had all the homies there, though so many that I didn’t get to game with all of them unfortunately, but it was great to see Dan at the Cool Mini or Not line 10 minutes into the con. Overall, it was very crowded, and for sure I want to hit Gameholecon and some of the other mid-west ones as a contrast this year. I’ve always had a lot of fun at Plattecon and that’s TINY. The overcrowding filled my fucking 3DS with PALICOS, which can only help the Monster Hunting right?
Lots of ‘news’ this year of you give a flying fuck about this sort of stuff.
First, the Zak S win of ennies for best writing, art, and another one for Red and Pleasant Land. D&D5 won about everything else, because D&D5 is very well designed and the books have top drawer production values. Apparently, in absentia, the Red and Pleasant Land guy was heckled by people when the win was announced and apparently it was one of the writers on the Marvel Heroic RP game(!?). Also, read this. People in gaming, no doubt about it, have the tendency to have a lot of social problems. GENCON with it’s sights and smells is case in point. When I can watch two fat dudes with pants 10″ too tight with their bone-white bellies hanging OUT below their tshirts by 2-3 inches and not bat and eye (and not have them constantly pointed at and laughed at by others, which would sadly or rightly would be the norm) or have someone who stinks like a cesspool walking around and not be phased (nor have other people make fun of that person openly by throwing soap at them, as would sadly be the norm), gamers are both an accepting and really, really socially struggling group of people. I won’t say our group isn’t terrible (which you will see from the coming pictures) and since the late 80’s we’ve built up a set of pictures that would send Richard Simmons into a fit. There was a day where we were playing Legends of the Five Rings or something CCG in about 1995/6 and there was a man that was as wide as three people with dirty sweat pants leaning over a massive FORTRESS EUROPA table. He farted there with his belly pressed over the table for hours until we couldn’t smell his ass-breath anymore. We took grainy pictures on a small camera and from that day on, a hobby was born.
Second, Games Workshop was actually at the con this year, and this is the first time I remember them being there for maybe a decade? What I saw on shelves were MASS amounts of boxes of Age of Sigmar all over the con both at the GW booth and retailers. The amounts of these boxes did not change and I never saw anyone with a box. I did see people buying shitloads of 40K stuff as normal. The diorama with minatures was nice looking, but I just can’t get past the shitty rules to even consider it. AoS might not tank, but certainly it’s core demographic was not at Gencon this year.
Third, Runequest was rolled back into Chaosium announced at the Con, pretty near when we were playing our game with Lawrence Whitaker of Design Mechanism. I noticed all the RQ guys I saw wearing Chaosium tshirts and was like: huh? However, based on the press release I think this is a good thing for the game, though if you have the big ass beautiful RQ6 book, HANG ON TO IT. We may not see it’s like again.
Fourth, where was WOTC? There was no TSResque castle that I saw, no D&D booth in the main hall, no MTG lines all over the place. D&D 5E has taken the reigns and just needs to ride.
Last, was the Ken Whitman drama over the Knights of the Dinner Table live action stuff. I saw what I think was one of the actors standing around outside a booth wearing a strange red wig for awhile. I think a core issue there is that, despite the costume, he looked like 15% of the crowd. Basically this guy was supposed to make some live action Knights of the Dinner table shorts, got kickstarter money and was supposed to have a filming of the shows at Gencon. Seems normal, but apparently people doubted the films would be done at all, and everything was sketchy as hell. I’m not seeing any info on what happened, but something to keep tabs on likely here.
While I just went there to game– there was too much internet kerfuffle to not pay just a small bit of attention to this crazy ass stuff.
Here is my fucking loot picture.
Heroes of Normandie, Monster Island, Junta, 2 boxes of EMPIRE OF EVIL, Strangling sea, a custom DM screen and a bunch of EPIC40K Orks!
