Author: littlemute

Champions now with some free

Champions Online just went free to play.  Sure microtransactions, but as the best part of the game is creating characters and their nemesis (just like the pen and paper game) this shouldn’t be a problem.  I’m going to jump in even with my extremely limited time for gayming these days.

Oops– Rackham is gone…

I guess I was a bit off in my post last spring about a new version of AT-43 coming out—looks like after some craziness and confusion Rackham Entertainment has gone into liquidation.  Neither of their websites come up and it looks like all news around the interweb tubes confirms that they’ve gone dark.  I think the lines will likely survive in some form, but holy crap I never expected to see one of the better rivals to Games Workshop’s fantasy and sci-fi dominance hit rock bottom so quickly.  While I really liked the rules to AT-43 when the full version finally came out, I was not impressed with the new version of Confrontation, specifically the prepainted miniatures*, while the same figures as some of the older lines, just looked crappy to me (where the AT-43 pre-paints looked really great on the table).

* not that I’ll ever actually get the time to finish painting my Drune…

Some More Cosmic Expansion Info

xenophile
Love the Hate

Fantasy Flight posted more info on the Cosmic Conflict expansion to the greatest board game ever made with the release of info for a new alien: Xenophile!  Other than the self-referential artwork comedy of an alien blubbering over one of the most hated alien powers in the game (aptly named HATE), I think the power is pretty solid as it’s after card reveal and add OR Subtract– given that you’re going to have at least one enemy colony in your home system during a game, this gives quite a bit of flexibility in the face of Anti-Matter, Loser, Magician, etc. Here is a link to the info page.  Hopefully this is out soon while we’re still stuck indoors due to old man winter.

Getting in on a good shootin’

I finally got to bust out my Old West miniatures and town over the Xmas break after almost 5 years of on and off painting for everyone’s virgin gun down.  We used Wargame Foundry’s The Rules With No Name to good effect as it’s a great pick up and play set of rules.  I just made up a scenario where a wagon tipped over in the middle of the town, breaking open some luggage that was filled to the brim with gold!  We had three players, and each player had three models (two gunman and one shootist) and won if they could survive or get off the board with the most gold in hand.  Gold was gathered by moving into touch with the wagon and rolling a d6.  I had to make up the action deck for the game before hand, so the players didn’t get a chance to pick their models from my meagre collection, but I did allow them to give them names, a fun way to start off the shootin.

TRWNN has an interesting impluse system for initiative wherein you build a stack of cards made up of all the models in play and add in a joker card (that instigates a reshuffle of the deck when drawn) and one card representing each class of character (Civilian, Gunman, Shootist).  The cards are shuffled and then drawn to determine who’s turn it is to act.  You can’t hold back a model’s turn and you don’t really know when each model will move again, so it makes for an aggressive game without a lot of dilly dallying around.  There is a way to control when your models move if you get a bit lucky.  When a class card is drawn, a player can take that card if one of his character cards is drawn next that is equal or above that class level.  For example, if a Gunman card comes up, the next card drawn is a Shootist or Gunman character, that player of that character can take the class card.  The class cards can be used to interrupt other model’s turns at any point (even in response to being shot at) to give another model an insta-turn.  This system gives a semi-random feel to the order of turns, and my only complaint was that some characters don’t get to move turn after turn if the joker card just happens to come up a lot.

This system of impulse is very much keyed to individual models and wouldn’t work too well if you were trying to simulate fights in big groups unless, like Confrontation, you allowed multiple models to act when a single card was drawn.

All I can say about this particular game was that my dice were the hottest I’ve had in a long time, and I almost felt guilt as my tiny lead men shot the tiny lead men of the others again and again.  One of my gunman killed outright two models in his first two turns of shooting, and I had my shootist out in the open, completely out of position relative to one of the other shootists, only to have one of the other shootist’s shots all go wild– and then said shootist was gunned down instantly with just about the best rolling you can have. See below.

We did not use the morale optional rule and this revealed an oddity about the TRWNN system– models can be wounded over and over and over at point blank range and still have a good chance of staying in the game (a model can be knocked out and come back on a dr of 1 whenever that model’s turn comes up).  One of the models had been shot and wounded 12 times and was still on the table, granted he couldn’t move, reload or turn in place, but he was still there, holding gold.

I would absolutely use the The Rules with No Name again, especially for pick up games like this.  It’s very beer and pretzel’s and though the scale seems to work best with just a few models on the table, the level of detail with the shooting and wounding is such that this isn’t a drawback, but simply what the ruleset is supposed to simulate.   Eventually as I get more models painted (in the next decade or so) I’d love to have a go with the Legends of the Old West rules, but that’s a dog for another day.

The deluge of Skyrim info begins

Not sure how much of this is official, but here is quite a bit of info on the game.  It all looks good, and it’s definitely got some Fallout in there.  Here are the most important bits as I see it:

No Classes
There’s really no reason to have classes in these games when it comes right down to it, the player will focus on whatever skills and traits they feel they need, whether for fighting or for sneaking around or seduction.  What this also trashes is the min-max class selection– i.e.: if you want to be a wizard, this is the class/race combo that is the best.

Sprinting
Yay, you can sprint.

Each hand does some stuff
Apparently you can dual wield, or have one hand do some fireball action while the other swings a sword.

New Ultracorps Mega game open for players

The free, nearly decade long,  beta of Ultracorps continues with a new mega game: Valerian.  This is a great MMO 4X Space MOO style game built circa 1997 and played, with a brief hiatus as it switched from the original developer to Steve Jackson games, ever since.  This game introduced me to tick based games where the players submit their turns and at a specific point during the day or week, the computer calculates all the results and a new turn begins.  Given the fact that a 12 hour LAN can only get through 30 or so turns of multiplayer CIV, and maybe over a weekend you’d be able to get through a game of HOMM3 with only a couple players, tick-based is really  the only way to play heavy strategy games multiplayer if you have anything to do in real life.  Give it a whirl and please don’t attack LORD GUNT!

Link

Top Ten Games I couldn’t finish in 2010.

I must admit, my eyes are far bigger than my stomach sacule when it comes to buying games.  If I dedicated my few moments of free time each day to the games I have instead of buying new ones, I would save a lot of money.  But then, what would money be for?  Would GOG and Steam still exist?

This year was one of abject failure in the realm of completing games.  I’m simply astonished at the pile of games for the PS2, 360 and PC that languish, unfinished on my hard drive or save slots.  Why? Kids, work, freelance, boardgames and, for the first time in quite a while, reading books outside of the Aubrey/Maturin novels.  There I’ve gotten quite stuck, but I digress.   Below is my list of gamefails along with conjectural excuses of note I care to make, as well as an expounding at how good the games are in most cases.

10.  Bayonetta.  This is not a difficult game, and it is quite a fun platformer, item hunter and boss-fighter.  The plot is ridiculous and if I had finished it in the first week or so, I wouldn’t have had time to mull over what I think is going on between plays.  Since I do, I have to say that they could have kept the plot all very simple and still been successful, instead they went for a really wacky ploto-obscuro that is largely irrelevant when you are fighting building size angels who’s pristine armor comes off to reveal demon-like MEAT as the fights get heated.  I aim to finish this one up this winter.

9. Empire Total War. As I am a Total War freak, this is quite embarrassing as they came out with a new version of the game before I was able to finish the grand campaign to Empire.  I blame it on the fact that I had the victory conditions completed 70 turns before the game ends– and yet saw no victory screen asking if I wanted to stop and savor my victory rather than wait until the end.  I can essentially press NEXT TURN over and over to complete this one, but I just can’t stop myself from mucking about with unconquered Spain or Italy, making the turns take over an hour each at best.  This will be finished or I am not a man.

8. Red Dead Redemption.  Any of the two people that regularly read this blog will remember my lingering obsession over the summer with the Old West action brought on by yet another viewing of The Good the Bad and The Ugly and two reads through of Blood Meridian.  This obsession manifested itself in some stints of miniature painting, looking at various Old West skirmish rules, and of course the purchase of probably the best old west game in existence– one I have barely scratched the surface of.  Frankly, this may never be ‘finished’ insofar as the % complete goes but I’ll give it a good college try.

7. Portal. Just didn’t finish.  It’s great and I know it’s short but I got bored and felt like shooting some shit instead of bouncing balls around.

6. Mass Effect. This is really a movie game with some sort of lame fights in between and some extremely tedious side missions that fail to really keep up the impression that you have the freedom to move around the galaxy.  Still, some really fantastic pieces of game here.  Someday I’ll wrap this up.

5.  Dragon Age Origins. This is long.  It’s a long movie game like mass effect.  I found myself waiting for the good parts people talked about while trying to pretend it didn’t suck.  Bottom line: the combat is just plain bad compared to almost every other party-based fantasy game I have played.  I just wish people would look at Temple of Elemental Evil by Troika and realize that, for all it’s faults, that and Jagged Alliance are the way to do party based RPG combat.  This probably won’t be finished as when I play it I start to daydream about other stuff I should be doing instead, like home repair and basic grooming.

4. Painkiller. Sadly, I wasn’t able to get this one completed as I started playing multiplayer (the same thing happened in 1996 with Quake) and sort of forgot about the single player.  I may try to rock through this again, but it’s unlikely.

3.  Gratuitous Space Battles. This one I really can’t blame myself for. I started the campaign twice only to have a patch to the game invalidate my current save.  Though fun, the campaign game did not live up to my hopes though I still think this little indy game is one of the most important 4X space games for the genre that’s been out since MOO3 destroyed it.

2. Left 4 Dead 2.  I got it late, the year ran out.  We are going to finish this and it’s going to be awesome.  As my buddy Graham says: The undead aren’t going to destroy themselves.

1.  GODHAND. This is number 1 for three reasons.  First, because it is the most difficult game on this list both in terms of gaming stamina and technical skill. Second it’s the most embarrasing because one of my buddies completed Demon’s Souls before I was able to finish GOD HAND, and I started GODHAND in early 2009.  Third, this is one of those games like Metroid, Mega Man, Samurai Shodown, Urban Reign,  and Guilty Gear Accent Core that are truly difficult to complete, a game where by necessity you have to learn the system of play inside and out before you have any sort of chance of victory.  It’s a game so difficult that the hapless and fail-ridden reviewer at IGN gave the game one of the lowest scores to date, totally discounting any review IGN does as valid forever. This has to be finished.