Author: littlemute

Battlefleet Gothic TEASE

My question when seeing this and the fact that Total War: Warhammer is coming out soon is when will the Games Workshop IP exceed in popularity the entirely derivative work by Blizzard Entertainment. Starcraft is played out, Diablo 3 was a complete mess from the story perspective and there hasn’t been anything original from them…ever really. Warcraft 3, for all it’s awesomeness, is just a derivative of Warhammer in the end.

GW has had some strange and capricious relationships with development houses and video gaming in the past, and who knows what the future will bring. Looking at this trailer though we are reminded that while Blizzard has the copy-cat Samwise, GW has both John Fucking Blanche AND Jes HOLY FUCK THAT’S AWESOME Goodwin.

 

 

and the retraction

So look, the Mod selling seems like a good idea.  I don’t think it’s particularly bad or evil–that’s a natural extension of the Steam Workshop and people put hundreds of hours into their mods that we enjoy and would likely push some cash to.  The people that made the original game legally need to get paid in this situation too, and Steam itself.  Seems all logical, but I can see where things would go terribly wrong, and did.  Now that the gaming internet (at least the lords and masters of the glorious race of PC gamers) exploded with vitriol over the IMPLEMENTATION of money for Mods on Steam and the retraction has happened quickly.  I think if they work on the implementation, this may actually work out fine.

The thing that this should teach us is this:

1) Valve isn’t evil.  And if they don’t have more money than they know what to do with already, I’d be absolutely shocked.

2) Bethesda isn’t evil.  They are in a much more tenuous position than Valve, so they need to make money.  One bad Elder Scrolls (which I don’t think could happen based on what I know about the company), not including the MMO, could tank their studio.  These guys have to squeeze the lemon as hard as they can to even survive.  They just need to watch out for stooping to Zynga style shit…

3) We matter as consumers.  As shitty people saying shit on the shitty internet we really don’t, but since we, of the GLORIOUS RACE of PC GAMERS are consumers of everything steam, voting with our money or the threat of it his a huge incentive not to collectively piss us off.

My simple solution?  Put a DONATE button on mods and the original software developer and steam take a single, small cut each transaction.  Will people still steal other people’s mods? Probably, but it solves a major problem just slapping a donate button on there.

Kickstarters to back

I was challenged by Matt when I stated that Boss Monster 2 was probably not the best kickstarter to back (since it’s a 2 really and not the original game, why would they need to kickstarter it at all?).  Boss Monster is a good light game, but not great (like Condotierre or Glory to Rome or 7 Wonders in the same vein).  Caveat to this I would say Boss Monster 2 may be one of the better ones for gaming up at the moment, but that’s because we just came off Winter kickstarter madness with stuff like the new Bulldogs and Bloodrage.

I don’t come off as a cunt without suggesting REPLACEMENTS, so here are kickstarters that you should back that are up now.

  1. De la Soul’s new album.
  2. Goodman Game’s 5th Edition Fantasy – even though I don’t yet play 5th, I have 1 and 2 of these and they are solid (one is Michael Curtis so there’s that) and can be used with any of the good D20’s that aren’t 3.5.
  3. Car Wars Classic Arenas:  I played as a kid but am not a big car wars fan– yet playing this out in a cabin in the woods would probably be pretty great.
  4. And from Wisconsin: Dice Display box and roller.  Fucking awesome.

I can’t back all these (only backed #2) since I’m spread out on Patreon and Kickstarter already too much recently, but you should since you have a lot of spare money right?

Total War: Warhammer cinematic vid impression

Good, but unsurprising news, TW and WFB are slapping together! This had been rumored for a long while and then leaked in some magazine a few months back so not a shock .  GW tried back in the day with Blizzard (which later became Warcraft), then later with Shadow of the Horned Rat, to get Warhammer on the computer successfully.  Frankly one couldn’t ask for a better mash up of brands and companies. Unless, of course, you were waiting for Total War: Medieval 3 which following their M.O., should follow Attila closely.

There are no gameplay bits in the following video, but if you’ve played any recent Total War games, you know what to expect minus the MAGIC and big monsters.   I’m pretty pumped for it, but then again I get a fucking giant boner every time any Total War stuff is announced or released and then have to untuck my shirt for like a whole day or look like BUSDRIVER.

Animation wise, awesome.  Not so great with the voice acting.  The Greater Daemon of Tzeentch at the end is wicked looking.   We have to remember that GW is in the process of destroying the Old World we grew up with– so we have to see how this leaks into the computer game. It may be that the TW game will coincide with the story of the destruction of the Old World, which would be fun to see rather than buying all the crazy expensive END TIMES books.

This reminds me I have not put hours into Attila nor played a game of 8th Edition in a looong time…

LotFP fans, we have our fucking Monster Manual

Deep inside the Referee book (now free) in the Lamentations of the Flame Princess Grind House edition, the author laments the use of stock monsters stating that they just aren’t scary or interesting and everyone knows what an Owl Bear is and can do and a Githianki isn’t frightening at all after you’ve fought hundreds.  He encourages DM’s  that ALL monsters in games should be original creations entire. The man put his money where his mouth is by creating the excellent Random Esoteric Creature Generator published by Goodman Games.  What’s more, in the Referee book he describes at length how to USE monsters in game so they have a, well, monstrous effect and don’t become ZZzzzzz or just a combat challenge.  This is why LoTFP hasn’t had a bestiary or monster manual equivalent these years past until very recently with Raphael Chandler’s Lusus Naturae.  Reading only a handful of entries so far, I have been extremely impressed, much more so than his previous work for OSRIC, the Teratic Tome which every other creature had some sort of boobs on it…lots of cool stuff, but too many boob monsters, even for me!

This leads me to a tangent about how generally impressed I’ve been with two other very recent bestiaries, one for Numenera, which has TONS of amazing creatures and entities that could be used in any type of game regardless of Numenera’s very different system from D20, and the 13th Age bestiary which really fired up my desire to run the game once I got my hands on it last year. Both are inspirational tomes. While 13th Age’s monsters are pretty stock D&D in many cases, the USE and EFFECTS of them are very original and what an AD&D Bullette does and what a 13th Age Bullette does is quite surprising.  Numenera has some basic stuff, but many, many of the creatures just go so far off the deep end your campaign will never come back– including a WEAPONIZED MEME.

Back to Lusus Naturae– each of the entries I read so far are worth at least a session of play, and some of them, an entire campaign.  So if you are a hapless player in my LotFP or Numenera games– look out!  (not so much 13th Age, since it’s gonzo fantasy and while I want the characters in real danger, they are super difficult to actually kill by design)

lusus1
You rang?

 

All the gorgeous snatch…

So I was in FLA last week and on the beach at Flagler and Daytona.  There were a couple cloudy days and the wind was up and the waves were pretty rough, and one day there was a bit of a rip tide you could feel up to your calves.   I like to try to body surf, despite my hairy body and pasty white skin on display.   But, when I was out there on one of the wavy days, two girls, probably in their late teens, early twenties, were also out in the rough. These gals weren’t the skinny waif types.  Since my wife and kids were there as well, I was trying to not leer at them, but being tourists to FLA: they were wearing bikinis.  In the waves.  You can imagine what happened multiple times.

So, being both a creep and trying to keep up appearances I constantly moved away from the area that they were while keeping close enough to witness boobs come out of the waves as they normally do in this type of situation.  What was terrible though is that whenever I would body surf in and catch a wave that shot me to shore, I would invariably end up right next to them and stand up just as they were tossed and turned all over the place.  I would just swim back out to the breakwater and try to move up or down the beach– but riding the wave in bam, right there again.  They probably though, who is this dirty old man? While I was thinking: who stays in the waves when they have bikinis on? That’s my FLA story.

Secret Wars II: Cloak and Dagger

For those of you steeped in Marvel geekery in the mid-eighties, this is a fucking brilliant read about the abhorrent Cloak and Dagger Secret Wars 2 crossover.  I had come out of my “buy everything Marvel” phase around this time with just how shit ROM had become and how piss Secret Wars II was from the outset– even as a little kid it was obvious something had gone terribly wrong with comics that would only be redeemed by the shallow but beautiful Image comics late in the decade.   This was also the time I started getting into Epic Magazine, Heavy Metal, Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing and Cerebus (which was just a confusing mess for a kid really) so it was a distinctive shift from mainstream comics.  Reading this, you can fucking SEE why in all the gory detail.

Beyonder checking out some booty.
Beyonder checking out some booty.