We were looking at Dungeon Crawl Classics, Feng Shui 2, 13th Age and everything was instantly booked within 5 minutes. Is it because these things are pretty cool and a lot of the other events fucking suck? Sure, but within 5 minutes? Ridiculous.
That said I’ve hung up my Shadowfist cards for anything other than casual play and that’s freed me up for an ALL RPG GenCon weekend– All RPG if I can get in any games that is. A weekend of wandering around the main hall like a zombie being touched by all that fat flesh has it’s appeal, but I’d much rather get some serious butt-rot from sitting in a chair slinging the fucking poly’s after spending my budget in the main hall the first hour of the con.
Growing up with the monster movies of the 70’s, there have been a lot of modern versions that have not done Godzilla or big monster movies justice in the recent past, including Cloverfield (an OK movie) and especially the Matthew Broderick fronted american version of Godzilla (1998). Meanwhile in Japan, Toho has been cranking out descent Godzilla movies, while certainly B movies, scratched the same itch the 70’s movies did.
Now, given that there hasn’t been an attempt in Japan since 2004 to put another entry into the franchise, and with the moderate success of Pacific Rim (wasn’t terrible, but wasn’t great either), there’s been room for another run at a series. And I say franchise because that’s what Godzilla is– it’s never a single movie, it’s always a series of movies that are judged individually and as a whole so this one is the start, and it was awesome. Godzilla movies are made up of three things: some ecological message telling people that the path we are on of consuming the earth and meddling with atomic forces is extremely dangerous, second, some human drama that ties into the monster part of the film and last, Godzilla fucking everything up everywhere and destroying stuff in awesome fashion for usually half the film. This movie does all of those things in spades. I was a bit worried about the last one, but it was ALL there, just not quite as early in the film as the typical formula.
Godzilla destroying the original American reboot Godzilla from Godzilla: Final Wars
What the new Godzilla did is combine the seriousness of some sort of horror and disaster movies (both the reactor meltdown in Japan and the tidal wave in India are represented in this film, so this hits close to home) with the fun of Kaiju monster battle and mass destruction. It does not pull punches, there is mass chaos, death and destruction in the film including many of the characters–yet it’s also very fun to watch and has some great battle scenes with Godzilla. When you see buildings collapse into rubble, you know there are people inside–unlike some of the Japanese movies, the director makes that clear, but also makes clear that if the main issue of the plot is not dealt with properly MILLIONS will die.
Secondly, nothing is more important than the physical design of Godzilla himself. This could be the one thing that tanked the 98 American movie: that wasn’t fucking Godzilla. I think every single fan of the big guy will say this fucking version in 2014 is undoubtedly Godzilla himself. He has the dog face, he has the girth to his body and the way he fights is spot on. Godzilla has to be awesomely powerful looking and…I hate to say this as a man, lovable at the same time. They nailed it.
All in all, an amazing film, highly entertaining and I cannot wait for the fucking next one– and since the movie will well clear half it’s cost the first WEEKEND of it’s release, this is likely forgone conclusion.
Fantasy Flight makes some excellent games and they keep alive many of the games that are the best ever made, such as TALISMAN and Cosmic Encounter. They have done right by these two certainly because they themselves know what players want out of those games. There have been a couple reprints/revisions of classic games that missed the mark. Warrior Knights, so beautifully created with such awesome pieces, was saddled with a terrible version of Wallenstein/Shogun’s action system and amounted to the players playhing VS the game system itself rather than each other. Another beautiful but flawed revision of a Games Workshop classic released just a few years ago was Dungeon Quest. The main issue with the revision being that the combat, extremely simple and deadly in the first version of the game by GW, was rebuilt heavy– very very heavy. Well, there must be life in this game since there is a revision of the revision coming this Fall that I will definitely pick up. I got to play the original only a couple of times at a convention and it’s a rush in and grab the loot before dying game. Since DQ is elimination, the key to such games (such as King of Tokyo, Love Letter and Epic Spell Wars: Duel at Mount Skullsfire) is that they are extremely short and simple–which does NOT mean bad. Simple (that is also good) is also very difficult to do in terms of game design. Take Warrior Knights (new version) vs Shogun. The first is very difficult to learn and especially to play, where Shogun, after the first turn of action selection and resolution, is easily grasped by players and it becomes about who can WIN the game against each other rather than who can learn to play the game system better. I’ve got high hopes for the new DQ.
I had high hopes for this one and it does have some quality to it, but after less than a week, I uninstalled it from my computer. It’s quite pretty and does exactly what you expect in updating the Age of Wonders series. I found it similar to Kings Bounty if comparing to new games. Certainly it’s worth checking out when it’s on sale, but for full price do not buy it. I was going to post some screen shots, but I uninstalled the game so fast I didn’t even take any.
I have one major issue and that’s all artillery/siege weapons. Stuff that throws rocks, tanks, cannons, etc. Given that these units have specialized functions in the real world, you assume that since they are not magical at all, they might just have the same specializations and weaknesses of their real-world counterparts. You’d be wrong. Flame Tanks can take massive amounts of punishment and dish out fire over a wide area even after moving. From what I’ve seen they are the best units in the game and can be spammed and spammed (unless you are against stuff that is immune to fire). However, It was the catapults that caused my quitting of the game. Catapults ALSO can take massive amounts of close combat and ranged damage, and can also move and fire their weapons at a hex NEXT to it (thus being in close combat). There is no reason in the world to not have all catapults and siege engines for your entire army. You don’t even need heroes.
While I appreciate the update graphically, like nearly all the fantasy strategy games outside of the Dominions series, Age of Wonders missed the mark.
Exalted 3 will someday come out. Gencon is looking impossible, but if you kickstarted the book you will have gotten a comic via drivethru to check out in the mean time. Since the lead developer is apparently not going to die (this was a consideration due to health issues), we will likely see this relatively soon, but Gencon: no.
The comic is good, it’s not GREAT, but it’s a good read and does not descend into some of the cheese that the Exalted COMIC book did (there was good stuff in there too). One thing of note is that people that kickstarted at a massive level to the new version got to contribute a character to the comic , so the writers/artists were dealing with some fanboy’s wet dream from the outset. Given that, it turned out really well compared to the horrible vanity shadowfist cards we’ve seen since Zman gave up the game.
I’m still excited for this fucker, but if it sucks, it’s only postponed my Exalted game using Marvel Heroic (cortex+) system.
Awhile back I had the opportunity to play YOMI face to face with another living human being. Later, I played via an old dead technology killed by Steve JOBS ,called FLASH, on a personal computer.
I discovered later that the creators of said game, YOMI, had built a piece of software for a more personal device called an IPAD that allowed users singly or in pairs play this game via this device. This was found to be fantastic news by all.
YOMI is for those of you that are intrigued by fighting games such as street fighter, virtua fighter, blazblue, jo jo’s bizarre adventure, time killers and World heroes perfect but don’t have the dexterity or desire to learn all the moves, get your ass kicked for months and months before winning even one game against another human being, etc. It is a TURN BASED fighting game that does an amazing job of emulating the genre. While I don’t think the character designs are all that strong (there is a fucking TAUREN from WOW in there…), the gameplay is really something to experience. At it’s core, it’s rock paper scissors, but once you play even a few games, you can have a view into the crazy depth of this game. Once you start to learn a character and beat the living shit out of some people with them (and vice versa) you come to know just how awesome this game is.
Someday when there is no more electricity or power we will be able to play fighting games via YOMI with cards, but for now, get it on the ipad.
Announcers suck compared to the old ones, but the rest looks good. Not much gameplay here but you can see the new player models. Humans look really solid.
I suck as a gamer and here’s proof. I think I started Dark Souls in late 2011. It’s now early 2014 and I’m still not done. I’m getting CLOSE though, and both as a touchbase on my progress for the single reader of this blog, and to push me through to the end, here is a picture that for some will speak a thousand words.
Haven’t posted in a bit which is largely irrelevant but notable in that I’ve been busy with not only wounding my very soul trying to finish DARK SOULS before I start the second one but I also ran Lamentations of the Flame Princess on Wednesday night and 13th Age on Thursday night. This is good. Given the potential of burn out, I think it’s going to be tough for me to work on both at once but fuck all I’m going to try. I’m in an enviable position, at least from my view, that I get to run both these games and can compare them. 13th Age, of course, represents the ultimate in new-school design for D20 and D&D. It’s fundamentally based off 4th Edition but has a lot of things from Original D&D that infiltrate it, like not using miniatures for fights (we sort of do) and all that. The fact that there are no experience points is wonderful and it’s very very easy for me to make encounters that are balanced (and imbalances them when I want), so that’s sweet too. However, the game does not have very many adventures out for it and that’s sad for now. I look at the massive amount of OD&D, 4th and 3rd edition content created in just the last 5 years and it’s staggering. While most is absolute tripe, there are still some gems in each of those systems. I think anything 4th Edition could easily be converted to 13th Age, but given that it’s a miniatures battle game (and a very very good one) that’s not the type of game I want to run at the moment (nor my players want to play), so the adventures for that are really fight fight fight fight. 3rd Edition– what can I say, there’s a lot of shit out there for it, and some excellent modules. However the rules are not to my taste and the stuff is probably really tough to convert. That said, 13th Age is great, but as a lazy ass GM, I want modules to pull shit from and they do not yet exist.
In contrast, Lamentations of the Flame Princess simply has so much content available to it out there because it is essentially a super-tight version of the Basic D&D from 1981. For the one off I’m going to run next week, I made a list of adventures on a piece of paper that included modules from the late 70’s to pieces written in 2013 and had this one girl I sort of know pick the name she liked best as my groups demise. Stuff like Secret of Bone Hill (classic) and Anomalous Subsurface Environment (newschool megadungeon) were on the list in addition to the Lamentations stuff so I am just crushed with choices. She picked something appropriately terrifying (the Lamentations of the Flame Princess module names are hard to pass up).
Hot chick zapping shit 1981
In contrasting these two games I must note one key thing that Basic D&D does compared to 13th Age, something that the Lamentations author notes in his referee book: you focus on what your character is doing in the game rather than what your character can do. There isn’t a lot of fucking around with X at will daily power and this combo of powers with other players in Basic D&D. One of the players commented during the Lamentations game: “I’ve got one spell and a mace! I can’t do anything!” yet that certainly didn’t stop the gaming night from being pretty damn awesome. The constraint of limited powers (or none) helped focus the game to different things.
Hot chick zapping shit 2013.
What 13th Age does it does extremely well. My players are starting to learn some bread an butter character buff and debuff combos that will serve them very well in the more difficult fights to come. The magic item system is easy to use and the constraints by chakra I adore as a GM and while classes can be complex, they reward study and application in fights. I really want someone to roll up a Wizard one of these days because that class is what I would play if I could stand playing rather than DM’ing. There are spells where effects are made up EVERY SINGLE TIME they are cast, and that’s cooking with all sorts of rump gas. Battles are fast and the escalation die makes it so later in a fight players are GOING to hit the enemies–and when some monsters also use the escalation die, look out! So both of these game systems I say at this time I really like, but 13th Age is in it’s infancy for adventures. What’s more, 13th Age and Lamentations of the Flame Princess are great for the lazy DM for sure, which, despite running two games in two different systems the same week, I really really am. I promise.
If you have a passing interest in the Old School D&D scene/’community’, I can’t recommend this blog enough. They basically say everything is absolute shit, so if they say something is good, which they do from time to time, it’s REALLY good. The blog also does trainspotting on some of the human trainwrecks barreling down the D&D nerd express (and most importantly, blogging about it) with shit like this amazing gemstone:
The fighter says, “I press her down to the sand. I’m very careful not to push to [sic] hard, not to hurry. I want her to understand that this is not sex, this is me caring for her.”
