Review – MRAAKTAGON

Welcome to 2023 and a look back at ’22

Time marches on my friends. Holy cow, it’s 2023. I am shocked at how quickly the years fly by since about 2008 or so… while I like to think this is due to having unprotected sex and the output of such things, it’s probably just about getting old and so little in each year MATTERS. In 1989, every week was some major life event it seemed like, but now, eh…

That said let’s look at 2022: the YEARS BEST SHIT.

Board Games

Lots of stuff came out that I have been waiting for, but the big one by Matt Ecklund didn’t get here in time for 2022. I haven’t gotten John Company 2, Bios Mesofauna to the table, so I can’t include them in a best of (yet).

The game of the year for me, despite the fact that the first version of it came out in 2019, is WARCRY. I’ve gotten 10+ games of this over the year and I will call it now as the greatest beer and pretzel miniatures game there is. Most games are 3-4 turns and take about 40 minutes from set up to tear down (or to the next game). I’ve now painted the majority of my terrain and I’m just about to start in on the next box set (Red Harvest) and paint some more Warbands. I’m going to do a big ass review of it and why would people play it vs the also excellent Frostgrave or Necromunda. Warcry has some constraints you have to learn to live with, but once you do, it is just superb and most of all, it makes me laugh when I get my ass kicked most of the time as it’s some crazy ass move or ridiculous roll.

Looking fine despite the unpainted terrain!

A mosh with NPC creatures and the Corvus Cabal.

The other game we played a lot of was Spartacus, which was originally released in 2012 (a great year for board games!) and has an updated, non-show-related version. I wish I had known this was THAT good back when it was sitting on shelves, we would have played the crap out of it by now. When you see that tons of people have built custom stadiums for the game, you can probably make some assumptions about the quality of the game.

BOOKS

I read a bunch but I can’t keep up with yearly releases of books, my favorites that I read this year (new, I read books I’ve read over again fairly often), all highly recommended are:

River of Earth – James Still. This is about a poor kid who follows his family around to different mining camps and towns. Doesn’t force the reader to dwell on what the character or author is thinking about situations, it just has the situations. It reminded me a lot of John Gardner’s Nickel Mountain, but not a slog which Nickel Mountain was, a pleasure to read.

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. Brilliant, short spy novel by Le Carre. He has an intro where he spells out that ALL of this is fiction and it’s just slightly influenced by his work in the secret service. People accused him of using real situations which he denies, saying his work as a spy was incredibly boring and stupid in contrast. I wanted to start on the George Smiley novels (Tinker Tailor, etc.) and this is the one to get that rolling.

The Passenger/Stella Maris. Feel like thinking about existence and getting sort of depressed but amazed at the same time? Read these. Ostensibly about some mysterious passenger missing on a plane that “crashed” into the ocean, it’s really about the conditions of existence that would allow that to happen or as McCarthy puts it in another novel: the joinery.

Movies

I didn’t see much in the theaters in 22. 2022 and this year is really just waiting for DUNE 2 since most of the time instead of going to a movie, I would just watch DUNE again The film of the year is the NORTHMAN, but we all knew that. Viking anti-hero revenge film? Oh yeah.

I liked the Terrifier 2, but it was too long and a couple parts took it too far to really love (which is why the fans love the movies, so I get it).

The Video Games

Elden Ring just blew everything out of the water this year, but there were some incredible games and a few disappointments.

What can I say about Elden Ring that hasn’t been said– it’s Dark Souls writ wide, with all the good and bad that comes with open world. I still haven’t finished the game, but I have played hundreds of hours, played dozens of them with friends and the PVP that comes with it. Overall I think the game is too long and probably should have ended at (spoiler) Margott v2. However, there are some fantastic bosses after that– and the Fire Giant is just incredible (and very hard). One of these weeks I’m going to put a fork in the game, but I just keep playing with my low level characters multiplayer and love it. There are so many builds, so many ridiculous weapons and spells, and with the multiplayer it’s a game we will be playing together for years. Is it as good as Dark Souls 1 or Bloodborne? No, but it doesn’t have to be in order to be an absolutely legendary game. Elden Ring has become the game that everything else will be defined against for a long time.

Vampire Survivors

I only have 12 hours or so into the game at this point, but for me it represents exactly what I love about indy video games– a very simple premise taken to the next level. Vampire Survivors is an anti-bullet hell game, in that you run around and shoot things that come at you (rather than dodging stuff that shoots at you). Running around with the whip on a grassy field at first is very boring, but just give it a chance and you will realize that it becomes like modern art at the end of a level with sprites filling the entire screen and you nailbiting that you’ll survive. This is a 2022 gem and everyone should play it. If you love this, check out RIFT WIZARD that came out in 2021– instant classic and takes the crown of SWORD OF FARGOAL for me.

Disappointment – Victoria 3

I was really looking forward to this game all year, especially after the horrible addiction that I had to Crusader Kings 3 and my love of Machiavelli the Prince, Port Royale and similar economic games. Victory 3 was just very strange to play and figure out, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing or what effects my actions actually had. Maybe there’s just too much going on, but one thing I will tell you in the hours I played: I was bored. CK3 set a high bar for strategy games (as well as Stellaris). I will give this another go at some point, but there’s been the call to Crusader Kings 3 again that has made it impossible. Why mange budgets when you can get cheated on by your spouse with your own bastard son of her mother’s!

There’s some great games that I got to play over break, but that’s going to be a separate post.

Music

My record of the year is CYGNI 61 by RTR. I didn’t listen to much else that was new. A new LORN just dropped recently so that will be on the list for 2023.

Hottest chick on the planet (2022 edition)

Rebecca Bagnol

2021 -EoY Favorite Comic: SPACE BASTARDS

After about 9 months of slowly collecting and reading the Invincible series, I was looking around for something GOOD in the comic store. There are tons of excellent comics tucked away between all the endless trash that comes out every month, but you have to search for them. While amazing art abounds, good or even passable writing is VERY hard to find in comics these days. I was looking for issues of the GODDAMNED (a story about Cain pre-flood that was pretty solid in the beginning) and came upon SPACE BASTARDS.

Space Bastards is a multi-writer, multi-artist affair and usually I hate those types of titles, the lack of a consistent artist to me is usually super annoying (BPRD and SUPREME by Image comics are good examples of this). However, Space Bastards has good artists, not all of them I like or I think are fit for the material, but there are a few that just NAIL it, like the esteemed Simon Bisley. I gave it a shot and the first issue I read was #6 and it had a part that I laughed out loud at– read again and laughed again. That has happened so rarely in most comics (with the exception of Groo!) that I can count the incidents on one hand. The story is a biopic about Chuck “Magic” Wagon and how his alcohol fueled rampages lead him to join the Intergalactic Postal Service; which is what the overall story is about. This particular comic goes completely off the rails as Chuck Wagon spirals into drug induced madness from which he never recovers. If you only read one issue, this is it.

Later issues concern the meta-plots more and having jumped in mid-series, I’m not super sure what’s going on, but that’s half the fun. Number 8 starts with an incredibly long rant/speech by one of the characters which is normally something comic readers can rarely abide, but this shit is psychotic and sociopathic GOLD. Not only are the characters violently insane for the most part, they are manipulative, capricious and none of them trust each other. While this is no League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with it’s both subtle and overt betrayals, it’s extremely compelling to just not know what the hell some of the characters are going to do and say at any given moment as they are prone to bouts of complete madness and mental breakdown. Recommended.

Behind the Green Door – oh boy

This will be a rare post about a pornographic movie. Don’t really watch porn and if I did, well, read on.

Cannonball Run did this to me. There’s a scene where the Asian Team is driving through a boring area, one of them falls asleep and the other (played by none other than Jackie Chan!) throws a video tape into the dashboard VCR (remember, this was 1981 or so, this would be seen as amazing at the time). While it could have just showed scenes from any type of fuck film, it clearly shows the film’s title before getting to the almost nude part. The name of that film: Behind the Green Door.

I’ve constantly made jokes over the years using this film’s title as it’s much more subtle than The Devil in Miss Jones, etc., for a porno, as most people don’t know what it is and then go look it up on their phones to catch the reference. Someone that knows Cannonball Run well will really have a laugh.

While I saw Cannonball Run when I was a little kid, I watched it again years later when I became a big fan of Jackie Chan. At the time, there was really no normal way to see the Green Door, so I forgot about it. I made the joke to someone a few weeks ago and decided then, if I’m going to joke about it, I better actually watch this fucking thing: and it’s a doozy.

The film begins with some guy going into an all-night diner and meeting an older guy. In the first scene you may be asleep already as it shows a woman fixing up coffee and tinkling dishes for a shocking amount of screen time, fixed camera. Then the chef comes out asks about telling ‘the green door’ story and the guys reluctantly say OK. Then it cuts (fucking finally) to a girl driving a car with the top down while showing the opening credits. It looks like it’s raining as she has the windsheild wiper on. While this is likely a staple in all later porn films, the actress looks and is dressed a bit like Francois Hardy rather than in a bikini or something like that. Next there are these guys from the diner, which must be a flashback, talking at a table outside at a hotel about some nonsense with bananas, it makes no sense and after about 2 minutes I skipped over this part. Then it shows the very young and quite pretty Marilyn Chambers (who starred in David Cronenburg’s Rabid a few years later) in a cool hat sitting nearby drinking a beer. This is the lady from the car. She’s listening to the nonsense story of the guys at the table nearby. Then some music is playing. This goes on and on and on with some focusing in and out on the same shot to the girl and to the guy babbling at a table. fucking glacial.

Then it’s night and the woman is dressed up walking down some stairs outside. She gets grabbed by a couple of guys in a brown station wagon and taken away.

Next is some scene in a bourdois and a guy with a handlebar mustache crushes a football until it pops and then he leads the guys from the diner, now dressed up in tuxes and wearing masks into some theatre. The handle bar mustache man laughs after they walk away and sit down in the theater. This MUST have been the MAIN influence for EYES WIDE SHUT, certainly.

Then there are some mimes on a stage. That’s right, mimes. This is 10 minutes into the film. I’m going to skip to the important parts as there aren’t very many at this point.

The mime goes on for awhile and then they bring out the girl they stole from in front of the hotel, who comes out if, you guessed it, the GREEN DOOR. A bunch of other women strip her down and rub her… then the magic happens. A black guy comes out on stage wearing only some sort of white cotton chaps with a shell necklace and his face is painted up. The music switches to African drums and the guy prances around showing off his half mast-wang. Then there’s a sex scene which consists mostly of close up shots of the actors faces with a few shots from behind where you can mostly see the guys ass in those strange white cotton chaps. This goes on and on and then just stops.

Then they take the lady and put her on a harness swing thing and she jacks off a couple guys, blows another one, and takes a cock from another, all while on some odd swings. This, amazingly, gets the audience all horny (instead of falling asleep…) and they start having an orgy. This is where the film could have gotten mildly interesting, but one of the guys makes the mistake of shooting his load and, I shit you not, the film devolves into what can only be described as a psychedelic sequence constantly showing this one cum shot in different colors with different film effects with funky music playing for a FULL SIX MINUTES. Think about that for a bit– SIX FULL MINUTES. Even stoned off of your ass you would still get up the energy to fast forward this on your VCR– probably all the way to the end or even just rewind to the beginning and give up.

After this sequence, one of the guys from outside the hotel runs up and escapes with the girl, and then they have sex. The end.

I now have suffered through (most) of this and can, with a perfectly clear conscious, make jokes and references to the movie forever anon. Thanks a lot Cannonball Run for queuing me in on this absolute porno masterpiece.

2019 – Favorite Stuff

Comics

2019 marks the end of the amazing career of Alan Moore with his final comic in the Tempest series of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It’s easy to make fun of the comic industry and the thousands of comics that are well produced but absolute dreck each year and in addition to that, what I think Moore was saying with Tempest is that the characters that people create are more real than reality itself and will continue on long after the society that created them has been destroyed. While everyone knows Watchmen, do check out his run in SWAMP THING, which was my first exposure to his work as a kid. Him quitting makes me feel pretty old.

Anyway, League was a very interesting series. I wish he had one more block of comics that were more the straight story (like the first two volumes) rather than getting super crazy (Tempest, Century and Black Dossier) or speeding through stories (Rose of Berlin, etc.). What I love most throughout League are the thousands of literary and comic references in each series. It’s almost too much to try to follow on your own, which is why the comics are fully annotated here. With Moore done, is there a reason to head to the comic store at this point? Not too much at the moment.

Films.

Lighthouse, Godzilla. Pretty much runs the gamut of my tastes right there. Godzilla was campy and awesome and Lighthouse was freak out like A Field in England, Mandy, and Valhalla Rising.

Star Wars 9 was interesting to see how they worked around all the problems handed to them from Episode 8 which, like Song of The South and for the same reasons, Disney should put in the vault. Yet it was not a great film and definitely had the ‘just fucking end it’ feeling. I enjoyed some parts, but it’s not worth watching again. Kylo Ren, the most interesting character played by the best actor in the series, had the weakest arc and stupidest outcome. It’s ok for Jedi, like the samurai and warrior monks that influenced them, to sacrifice themselves in battle! Fucksakes. As mixed as the series was, Adam Driver carried the team all on his own. Anyway, I’m getting pumped for sitting down with the Mandalorian though.

My favorite non-2019 movie this year was the LAST VALLEY. Never heard of it? of course you haven’t, but it’s got Omar Sharif and Michael Caine and set during the 30 years war. Among many excellent scenes, in one they play dice for a woman! 1971 had some awesome films.

I probably should have seen a lot more films this year, but just about everything seemed so boring, it’s more fun watching reviews than the actual films!

Board Games.

Root is my number 1 game for 2019. Played the shit out of it, forced everyone to play (many didn’t need it), ran a tournament at Gamehole con and I’m eagerly awaiting the expansion (though I did the print and play with the moles) which will spark up another frenzy of playing. This has killed so many games in my collection. I know this may sound strange, but it scratches the 40K and WFB itch as well.

Otherwise, my current favorites are the PAX series from Sierra Madre Games. I cannot tell you how much I love Pax Porfiriana– so much so that I haven’t even got around to Pax Pamir. Pax Transhumanity is good, but not compared to the other Pax games that I have (Ren, Pamir, Porf). Right now unfortunately for my gaming group (or fortunately if you also love these games), Pax is what I’m bringing every time.

Boardgames are in a really odd state at this point. There are amazing designs coming out, but there are so many design-by-the-numbers worker placement/engine/point salads games that are really all the same and, in general, super tedious. I don’t want to pick on Stonemier games, but they seem to be the Nickelback of boardgame publishers– just putting out the same thing: “multiplayer” solitaire, puzzle, tableau point salad games with a slapped on theme. I guess this is what people want these days. ZZzzzz…

While I’ve stopped doing boardgame kickstarters for the most part, we’ve had had some good times with Zombicide Invader but not enough to warrant the space it all takes up, so I’m on the fence with that one. My kids seem to prefer Massive Darkness anyway despite the fact that it’s much more complex. I like Invader with the kids because it’s NOT complex and I don’t have to explain tiny details all the time, or we get our ass kicked because they forget everything they have leveled up on their sheets.

I did NOT get in a bunch of games of Hate in 2019, which came out early in the year. I don’t know what to say about that one except that it is an absolute work of art from the rulebooks to the boards and especially the miniatures, which are the best that CMON has come out with by far. Seems like it may be a fun day to do a short campaign with 4-5 people, but hasn’t happened yet.

Video Games.

My game of 2019 goes to Samurai Shodown. I just got it, it came out this Summer and I should have picked it up on day one. My mistake.

The game I spent the most time on this year, which is incredible, was Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Simply an amazing open world game trying to be as historically accurate as possible. I really never expected anything like this to ever be a large, huge budget video game. Play it as soon as you can.

Lastly which is an honorable mention is RAGE 2. While the whole thing didn’t really come together, the shooting parts, as I noted in my review, are SUPERB and it’s a damn fun game with an uninspired story with the most unfortunate part being that the vehicle combat was uninteresting. I had a lot of fun with the game and will probably reinstall when there’s more DLC action.

Music.

Well there wasn’t an Aphex Twin record this year, and that’s OK because last year’s Collapse was all we needed for awhile, plus the live shows he has been doing the whole year have been incredible.

In 2019, I’ve been listening to a lot of Hadyn and some other random stuff, but I don’t think I listened to any new albums this year enough to comment. Nothing from Wisp (Dwallicht), Lord Huron, Squarpusher (he did a modern organ music thing that was pretty interesting but not on his own).

That said, I’m going to say my album of the year is Hadyn’s 64th.

This is from ’78, but also very interesting.

RPGs

Last and probably least are Role Playing Games. This year I pretty much put everything RPG on hold due to other real life stuff. Next year will be better as I’m a community leader in a certain youth paramilitary organization that’s taking up quite a bit of free time but won’t be next Fall. I did get to run DCC and Feng Shui 2 this year and played in a good Call of Cthulhu one shot, but that’s about it. Most of my RPG stuff is gathering dust so I’m probably going to shed a ton of it in 2020. My three favorite RPG’s as of now are Mythras, 13th Age and of course, Dungeon Crawl Classics.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th edition looks like it will have some awesome adventures coming out, including a redux of the Enemy Within, but after talking to some friends that played it extensively in the last year, the system has a lot of fundamental problems, which is really unfortunate in this day and age and especially after the mess that was 3rd edition by Fantasy Flight.

Obligatory Star Wars post

Because it’s 2018 and I did go see the Last Jedi the first night it came out, just like I have all the movies since Empire Strikes Back, I’m going to write a few paragraphs about it for posterity. This is mostly I can look back at this post when we are hit with even WORSE cascades of space-piss than this one (the Han Solo movie for example). There’s a ton on the internet about the film and more and more daily. Mostly, it’s that this “Star Wars” film has a ruthless misanthropist message, but not in a Sword of Doom type of way, but in an angry, resentful sort of way– the sort of film that would come out after Trump beat a clearly more qualified female candidate for president of the united states.

The space battles looked great, but lacked much of the emotional intensity that Return of the Jedi or a New Hope had. I get that the ‘bombers’ in the first scene couldn’t ‘drop’ their bombs and that was all stupid. It was forgivable except that it was a harbinger for things to be stupid later. That said, the film was not as “war-y” as Rogue One, and that was sad. Rogue One the conflict felt a lot more intense and real, where in the Last Jedi, it felt like a Star Wars animated series episode at times.

The final surprise attack by hyperdriving into the big ship pretty much made it so the Death Star could not have existed for long since the rebels could have constantly sent (unmanned) ships warping inside it. Of course, the Imperials could have done the same thing to any of the planets that opposed them as well. There needed to be some technical reason for that to be able to happen– like the means by which the ship was TRACKED in hyperspace (which they made a big deal about but never closed the loop on?!) allowed that ship and that ship alone to teleport inside the other ship. Nothing like this was presented of course and to me that’s a plot hole.

While it may have been inevitable, they handled the legacy characters poorly. Luke was not portrayed in a way that made sense at all based on the original films. Leia was force sensitive right? But all she did was save herself? So Yoda’s statement of “there is another” meant nothing (and yet they will be making an entire movie about the kessel run in contrast). I don’t care about the new characters EXCEPT in relation to the old.

To echo red letter media: what happened between Return of the Jedi and Force Awakens was that our beloved characters were made out to be miserable the entire time between films, and not just because of the Star Wars Xmas special (which I sat through over the Xmas break unbelievably).

Of the new characters that are worth talking about, Adam Driver was quite good, and frankly his character is the only one I care about at all in these new films on his own. His scene where he asks the Mary Sue to give up on all the cyclical destruction was the only poignant scene. Finn was underutilized and pretty much comic relief, though what he ended up doing in the film was not funny at all.

So I’ve used the term a few times already, but certainly, Rei will go down in history as the poster child Mary Sue forever. In fact, the term Mary Sue may become Rei (like, “rewrite that chapter man, that character is a REI”) or even “Daisy”. I REALLY thought she would die in this film or get messed up on the level of Luke in the Empire Strikes Back. The scene where she goes into that hole in the island and just saw herself infinitely in every direction was when the film hit rock bottom for me. That was the spot for a Lynchian or Tarkovsky-esque coming of age TRIPOUT scene. Instead, it was fucking meaningless pysse.

My own thoughts on the film is that it essentially projects a message of nihilism: people are ground to dust in a cyclical, unending conflict based on the misery of dualism which reflects in all ways that this is the beginning of unending films based on the same conflict grinding to dust infinite dollars spent by fans, and this fact was obviously felt excruciatingly by the writer.

Based on this film, there is no hope or happiness for people that are force sensitive AND trained in the ways of the force in Disney’s version of Star Wars. Just the crushing knowledge that with the power comes unending misery, conflict and death. For a film about a pure warrior caste like 13 Assassins, great. For an order of enlightened space monks? uhhh? The capitalistic focus and the misanthropic messages, with no overall controlling story arc for what’s going to happen, would drive any writer to a nihilistic state, and that certainly came out in the film.

Dunkirk

Finally got to see Dunkirk last night and it was most excellent (in 70mm no less). No over dramatizing, nearly zero dialog and a sheer focus on the visuals was how I would describe it. Also, a patriotic film for the stiff upper lip British. I don’t have to much to say about it except it was superb and you should go see it.

A key thing for me in the war films is the attempt at historical accuracy in the uniforms, equipment and dialog/actions of the characters. For example, Americans hit the dirt when they come under fire, whereas Germans and Russians typically did not, they would stand their ground (within reason, they weren’t stupid) and return fire. Undoubtedly, the Germans likely thought that the Americans were breaking immediately after coming under fire, but were very surprised to find that they were simply hunkered down to assess the situation before getting stuck in. When you watch war movies and this doesn’t happen, it’s quite off-putting to say the least. I did not have any points in Dunkirk where I was thrown out of the film due to some gross historical inaccuracy.

While not an aviation buff, my favorite parts of Dunkirk were the plane sequences. Maybe it’s because it’s the only fighting in the film, but I more that they were shot beautifully and as far as I can tell, extremely realistically.

Lastly, let’s talk about what happened. The Germans came through the Ardennes forest, past the Maginot line and were spewing all across France faster than anyone could have possibly imagined (remember these guys were still thinking WW1 static defense tactics and likely had no idea what Guderian had up his sleeve even after the invasion of Poland). So they trapped the British and French at Dunkirk, but didn’t send the army in for the final blow to capture the remaining brits/French. Why did that happen? Popular opinion was that Hitler was feeling friendly with the British and wanted to come to terms, and this is entirely possible if Hitler had been fighting a war for limited objectives; this would make sense. That is, the Germans invaded France for the same reasons they did in the Franco-Prussian war– to re-unite what they thought was greater Germany and throw off the yoke of debt for WW1. Letting the expeditionary force go across the channel in that context would have been fine, as Hitler would have made a separate peace with France, acquired territories that were stripped of Germany after WW1 and everyone could have gone home (and waited for the Russian invasion of Europe most likely). Yet, Hitler was not fighting a war of limited objectives– he was out to put Germany into a war for all the marbles, of total conquest of Europe. I do not believe and facts seem to assert as well that he did not hold the leash of the blitzkrieg to make nice with the limeys. I think two things happened: either the Germans on the ground got nervous (I know this is unimaginable based on what you’ve seen in most war films since WW2, but if you read the direct sources, especially Guderian, this happened a lot) or they ran out of gas for a full assault. Gas is like a tether for the blitz and if you overstretch it, you end up in fist fights with the enemy while your tanks sit in the mud (see the sequence in Patton) and that may be just what the situation on the ground was: tanks in the mud.

What this leads is to is the question as to the ability of Germany to actually attempt a cross-channel invasion if the British army had survived, or if it had been captured. Based on Guderian, the frustration of the logistics of that attack may have been the final straw for Hitler to foolishly attack the Soviets (remember, as I said above, it was total war and not for limited objectives), at which point any conflict with England and her allies was simply a side-show to the greater conflict between Germany and Russia. So it follows that the Dunkirk disaster, a disaster from the the German perspective that is, could have precipitated Hitler’s choice to attack Russia, making Germany’s ultimate defeat assured. And yes, I believe if the Germans had treated the Ukraine situation very differently than they did (the Ukranians could have been a buffer state between Russia and Europe as the Germans could have come in as liberators), they may have been able to hold off the Soviets enough to start planning another invasion across the channel, but by then the Americans were not just lend-leasing, but actively part of the conflict.

Gencon 2015 summation

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.

2015loots — Heroes of Normandie, Monster Island, Junta, 2 boxes of EMPIRE OF EVIL, Strangling sea, a custom DM screen and a bunch of EPIC40K Orks!

And… other pictures.

A “new” 3DS XL and Monster Hunter diatribe

This is going to be my LOOOOONG post for the week. For my bus ride to work, I got a “NEW” 3DS XL only to play Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate Edition. Now, this is an expensive bit of hardware at 200 bones plus 40 for the game, and I wanted to speak along such lines in case people were interested to see if it was worth it. TL/DR: it is.

MHU4 — This is actually a screen cap from my 3DS!

Many of us do light gaming on our iphones or androids when we are waiting around for other shit to happen. These mobile games are good, but casual, and frankly, most are a bit on the shite side. The few that rise to the top like Dream Quest, Ascension and King of Dragon Pass can only be played for so long before burnout sets in. Even if you check pockettactics.com a lot, you find that despite the THOUSANDS of games on the iphone, so few are any good or worth playing for more than a couple hours.

What’s amazing is that people try to adapt games that need a controller of some kind to the iphone form factor and expect users to use an on-screen pad or joystick plus buttons. Shamefully, I have bought some of these games: King of Fighters, Monster Hunter 3 and others. They are not bad games, but they are terrible to control and pretty much useless on the form factor. You’ll read favorable reviews of these games and the on-screen joypads, but let me tell you when you use the 3DS XL for similar games, the iphone fucking sucks in comparison.

Engineering
Being Nintendo, the engineering of the 3DS is top-fucking-drawer. Everything is responsive, button presses are crisp and they added this little NUB in the upper right of the lower piece that can be used to control a camera view in third person 3D games– which is absolutely perfect for games like Monster Hunter (or Dark Souls, or Skyrim, etc.). I didn’t use this at first and was sort of frustrated, then found it by accident and it was like a completely new experience that blew my ass off the whole bus.

Loading times, the bane of any system, are nearly non-existent on the new 3DS XL, which is not what I expected. The main issue with Monster Hunter is that you are in relatively small areas, sort of like the original Fable. The monsters run off and sometimes you fall into another area and you get a loading screen. If it’s slow, this is extremely frustrating. On the 3DXL, sometimes I find myself wishing they were slightly longer! While the game I’ve played on it was fully 3D, it’s not like it is pushing tons of polys, but what it does it does FAST.

Games
Let’s face it, as a geezer I’m not in the demographic to be playing 90% of the 3DS games currently out. I do enjoy a JRPG from time to time, but most of them are real… kiddie. Yet, most parents aren’t going to buy their kid a 200$ gaming system when those fuckin kids already have an iphone or ipod touch, so I have a feeling that the older generation X people that grew up on NES and SNES ARE the target audience for the new 3DS XL. For us though, there is only one game out currently, and that’s Monster Hunter 4. The basic question you have to ask yourself is whether or not Monster Hunter is worth 240$ in cold hard cash as there are, at present, no other games that really pique my interest at all. Since Nintendo is really it’s own hardware and software shop and don’t let too many people into the party, there’s never going to be a glut of games, but the games they do release, if you are in the target audience, are likely gold stars. So is MH4U worth it? Emphatically with about 25 hours into the game, I would say yes. Given that MH is a way of life in Japan, it doesn’t take long to figure out why it’s such a phenomenon.

MH is a cheeky ARPG game where you play a guy or girl that hunts various large monsters, skins them and make armor and weapons from their bodies (and foods). Essentially, there is a little exploration, quests, a bunch of item management and then a huge amount of boss battles after boss battles. These boss battles can take up to an hour to complete so it’s serious business when you start a mission vs a monster (or multiple monsters). Whats more, it’s local and online multiplayer, so you can hunt monsters together (which I haven’t tried yet).

Aesthetics
While this is not going to win any awards in pushing any type of edge for 3D graphics, and is fairly low polly, what the developers and artists DO with those pollys is gorgeous, much like Warcraft 3. The monsters are beautiful and highly characterized. The NPC’s you can’t get a really close look at but they look fine and the vistas are absolutely breathtaking in some places. If you do get the game, remember to look up on ever map!

What hooks you is the armor and weapon sets, which I’ll go into more in the item management area below. There are hundreds of combinations of armor based on the creatures you destroy and can craft and going from looking like a country bumpkin to a badass motherfucker with mothra wings and chitin legs is a very pleasurable experience. While stuff like Dark Souls and Skyrim are great RPG’s, they are also fucking dress up your doll games, and MH has that in spades. You like doing that? I do.

Gameplay
I was very much hoping MU was not a God of War/Kratos type game where you just have a wank at how badass you are and can pull any moves your character has at any time and the monsters eventually fall down. After Dark Souls, those types of games are unplayable to me and luckily, MU is not that shit at all. MU is a very tactical real time boss fight game that doesn’t eschew the cinematic parts of the fights, but it’s not about that stuff primarily. You have to really time your attacks, know your (very short) combos and use your items like traps and tranq bombs wisely or you will be chopped meats. There’s a lot to go into here but the core game is you, in third person view, going up against a monster that is 10X your size in some cases. You can’t pause, and you can’t use items while your weapons (and sheild if you have one) is out in most cases. You can jump on top of Monsters and hang on (like Dragon’s Dogma), find their weak spots and chop them off (like a tail) and run all over the place climbing up walls, dodging all over. Tactics, movement, placement of attacks all in real time can be quite challenging and fun.

The main adjustment you may have to make as a new player is that it’s not particularly hard, nothing like Dark Souls, but when you go after one of these big beasties, you have to go all in. You can’t just walk up to it and start whacking away and expect to kill it or even survive. The game forces you to take a very planned approach to your take down. Do you need a shock trap? Do you need to paintball it a lot because it runs a lot? What special damage types or effects does it generate that you need special armor/potions for? Can you take it alone or do you need help to draw aggro while you climb on it? Do you have weapons/damage types that can hurt it? there’s a lot going on with each of the monsters. Some even transform during fights into either a super mode or a weak and running away mode that you have to deal with. It truly engages the dexterity and the tactical brain in many of the same ways as Dark Souls and it’s FROM ilk.

In addition to the boss monsters, there are mook monsters and gather quests, but they are really easy (so far at least) even the annoying egg gathering quests. Fun filler when you want something not so intense for a bit. Soon you will be back to take down the big guys though.

Item Management
As a former Diablo 2 Zyel and current Torchlight 2 player, I do enjoy light item management in my games. I’d say MU leans to the hardcore item management a bit rather than casual. Armor does a lot, augmenting skills and having slots for some sort of gems that I’m not sure about quite yet. There are a lot of options for armor and weapons in the game and of course the armor aesthetics are critical. Killing enough Gore Malgala to have a full set of armor is quite a feat.

Weapons are similar and I would describe your weapons set you choose as your ‘Class.’ So you can switch classes at any time, but then you’re going to need to build a suitable weapon from Monster Parts to match and that can take farming. From what I’ve seen, many players have their main weapon set that they are best at and a secondary for Multiplayer support or role specific. There are tons of different weapons in the game, and each type demands a specific style of gameplay. I run two weapons at once, despite lindybeige, and it’s very unique even beyond just constantly attacking in that you can power up your chi or whatever it is and then go into a sort of super mode and then go into a super mode on top of that if you play it right. While unique, the weapons are not complex with the exception I think of the Insect weapon where you have a big sword with a bug on it that you can send to attack or gather items from the monsters themselves.

Summation

The 3DS XL (new version) is an amazing piece of hardware that I’ve just scratched the surface on in terms of games. Monster Hunter 4, being THE game for the system above all others is quite simply a reason to buy a 3DS in the first place– likely, you may not need any other game for the system. The fact that it plays the old DS games like Disgaea and Advanced Wars no problem is another big bonus, because a lot of those games are cheap as shit these days.

Emily Surname

The Gaming of 2013

ahhh… the unlucky ’13 year was quite a year for games– or, dare I say, it should have been. We had some MASSIVE releases last year with the culmination in some cases of decades of work for some development teams. Yet for all their glory, the massive budget games were not the ones that I played and enjoyed, with a few exceptions.

Let’s run down the releases I got to play. Now I’m an ancient person with familial and work duties so there’s no chance in a given year that I’ll be able to play even close to everything that’s good. I have to make choices– very difficult choices with my budget of TIME.

Here we have the list of stuff I played or was seriously considering in order:
Anarchy Reigns: This was the first game I bought in 2013 and it was…not great. The price tag was good at 25$ or so, but I couldn’t get through the single player and the multiplayer, while interesting, just didn’t hold my attention. The key issue was the core of the combat system– it just wasn’t all that great. Compared to the AMAZING Urban Reign for the PS2, which is quite similar, it was a vast disappointment and from the ex-Clover team, that was sad.

Crysis 3: I am a huge Far Cry fan and though it pissed in my mouth with Far Cry 2, I still like the original developers a lot and I picked up the original Crysis and it was great fun. I haven’t bitten on 2 or 3 yet but probably will in the future. I guess what did it for me was continued play of Battlefield 3. Crysis 3 just seemed redundant and I didn’t buy it.

Hotline Miami: The first indy game of the year I picked up. The ad campaign for this one was so incredible it was a must buy. I never finished it — to be truthful after the school shooting last year I just couldn’t play it anymore– but I got a long way into the game before moving on to other games. It was awesome.

Hear of the Swarm: Ok, for all it’s polish, Starcraft 2 is not fun for me to play. The single player is quite boring and the actual storyline EXECUTION is just shit (the ideas are really cool though, just executed poorly and all tongue and cheek with the shitty-accent space rednecks and trying to be serious at the same time plus romance? what a space pissery!), the multiplayer, the meat of the game, feels like a fucking chore to me. Plus, it’s a terrible annoyance to have to use Blizzard’s version of steam and ALWAYS BE ONLINE. I figured out finally that as much as I love RTS games and Warcraft 3, I’m just not a Starcraft player so I skipped this one and will likely never play Starcraft 2 in any form again because it’s jsut goddamn tiresome.

Call of Juarez: Gunslinger: This was an impulse buy and I didn’t get through it but played it a bit and was impressed. It’s essentially a rail shooter with a CRAZY story integrating with just about every Old West hero in the late era (think Jesse James/Butch Cassidy). If this is cheap, pick it up, you won’t be disappointed even if you get like 3-4 hours of play only.

The Last of Us: Ok so this was a PS3 exclusive and I had no chance to play it. Apparently this is a great game for the story as it integrates stuff from the hugely influential THE ROAD into a zombie shooter. I just wanted to note that if this had come out on other consoles, it would have sold a LOT more copies, especially PC. Plus this has that short lady that’s in all the fucking movies these days that is always talking too much on screen.

Xcom: Enemy Within: This is a follow up to Xcom: Enemy Unknown from 2012 and I just didn’t bother with it despite my love for the first game. I hope this combat engine sees more life as it’s great. I will pick this up eventually…

Company of Heroes 2: Ok so here is a sequel to one of my favorite RTS games. COH, along with Warcraft 3, redefined what I wanted out of an RTS, and they did it in very different ways. Unfortunately, the ENTIRE COH team left Relic Games long before COH 2 was started and I read so many bad things about the game that I didn’t pick it up. The comments from Russians about the game is pretty crazy if you check metacritic– I guess they forgot that Stalin was a murderous dictator that was able to save the country from another murderous dictator?

Rogue Legacy: While I don’t have a controller to hook up to my PC, I gave this one a shot and it was pretty interesting. It’s not Battle Block Theater though.. no sir. Hence, I had problems playing it for very long.

Dota 2: 2013 IS the year of DOTA2, hands down. The game came out of beta and everyone was playing it before, and everyone and their MOTHER is playing it now. It is the best game of 2013, no question about it. Obviously it’s a game that doesn’t appeal to everyone and it’s a very very deep rabbit hole to get into (and you have to practice) but I think this was a huge release for the year. It’s tough to say it was the best when you want to give it to something new– since the game is getting close to 10 years old from it’s first incarnations, but DOTA 2 is by far the most important and best game of 2013.

Saints Row IV: I loved Saint’s Row 3. Loved it and played the shit out of it. IV is excellent— except I can’t play it anymore. Whether it’s my configuration (unlikely) or a patch I can’t tell, but the game will no longer run on my computer. I got 20 hours in and then simply had to stop playing after one of the patches hit. I uninstalled, reinstalled, check the interweb tubes for a solution which ended up being “wait for the next patch” which I don’t even think ever came. Sad that they didn’t take their PC users seriously this time around.

Diablo 3 (consoles): The monumental failure of a game that is Diablo 3 hit consoles in 2013 and they did a good job. Unfortunately, the game is fundamentally flawed and cannot be ‘fixed’ with the removal of the real money auction house. This is what happens when you spend 12 years and millions of dollars on what amounts to a PAY TO PLAY iPHONE GAME.

Total War Rome 2: How the mighty have fallen. This was my fucking BIGGEST disappointment of the year. I warned my wife and wee children that I would be huddled in the basement for MONTHS on this fucker, but I put in 40 hours of frustration and was done. Rome 1 was my second choice for game of the DECADE from 00 to 10 only second to the almighty Warcraft 3. What the fuck happened? 1) Too large of a budget 2) Too short of a timeline 3) crappy battle engine. This series is dead to me. Shogun 2’s battles sucked despite EVERYTHING else about the game being excellent. The design choices + the battles being shit tanked this game forever. Warhammer Fantasy Battle Total War will suck.

Path of Exile: Another Diablo 3 killer, I did not get a chance to play this and probably won’t. It’s been on my radar for a long time, but — I just want to keep playing Torchlight 2– like forever.

Battlefield 4: Why come out so soon? I still feel like I didn’t have the time to get into BF3 and ALREADY there’s a new BF game out? And it’s not an offshoot like Bad Company or 2142, it’s the full on thing… why? I just didn’t want this and saw no reason to buy it. This does not need to come out every 2 years…

And for all that– it’s still just the year of DOTA 2.