The Western genre ain’t dead, it just needs some creativity applied to it.
Hateful 8. Getting close! I’m glad Tarantino went through with this after the script leak. This will be glorious.
Bone Tomahawk. Looks BADASS and I do believe it is a horror/weird West tale (check the lower right part of the image…those aren’t Apaches!).
I walked into a game store that I haven’t been in for many many years, if ever (I can barely remember) and it was a religious experience. This was a real game store with new board games that were vastly outnumbered by old ones of every kind you can imagine. I perused the shelves and among the stacks found a copy of Warrior Knights: Crown and Glory expansion, which has been out of print since 2009. I haven’t been able to find it for a decent price for years. I picked it up for retail at 20$, but it goes for $70-120 still in the shrink online. Sweet right? But the problem is, I don’t like the Fantasy Flight version of Warrior Knights very much. Both times playing it was a bit of a chore– like a bad version of Shogun or Wallenstein. However, from what online nerds say, the expansion is essential to making the game good and the base game should never be played with out it. I’m at a bit of an impasse. With similar titles that I know play well, like Fief and even Game of Thrones (not a very good game, but easy to pull out because people know the backstory), Warrior Knights would be tough to get on the table. What’s more I have the old ’87 Games Workshop version to boot! So sell it, or keep it in the shrink– or play the fucker?
The point of this post is to note what an actual game store should be like. Front face has new stuff everywhere, this is the stuff that will flow through the store like MTG and Dead of Winter and various 7 Wonders and Catan expansions with whatever RPG’s are hot enough to be on the shelves (likely soon dominated by 5th Edition based on feedback), but I see no reason to have a large area for old ass games, RPG’s and general gaming crap to sell, and to have a trading system for gamers to get rid of their old stuff. Because game stores usually do not occupy prime commercial real estate, as they are destination stores that people will go out of their way to go to, the pressure that everything on the shelves has to flow out of the store within a month can’t be too high?
While focusing more on old stuff, this place I was at today is the type of store Napoleon’s down in Milwaukee used to be like. They had an area in the store where they would place stuff that they had bought from people or traded, and sold them at fair or low prices. Checking that every few weeks was nearly always a gold mine. For example, I got an entire first edition wood elf blood bowl team for 15$. I picked up a stack of old modules for basic D&D for a song as well. Store was happy, they made cash, I was happy as I got something not easily found. This is good.
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.
Worth.
30K in 72 hours. Pirate? Zombie? Ninja? Smough and Orenstein? Barbara Palvin? Gaiking? Nope nope nope.
MARTIN LUTHER!!
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.
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.
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?
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…
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)
