Xcom Review: a finished game!

I did it.  I finished a game.  So rare, so unique to actually push through and complete any game I start– it must be good, right?   Yes.  The new Xcom delivers the turn based goodness big time.  While it is not up to the Jagged Alliance 2 level of turn based goodness– Xcom is by far the best modern TBT (turn based tactical) game I’ve played and hopefully will usher in a new age of copy cats that take the genre to new heights.  This was an A class title and while I’m not sure about sales, it must have some publishers thinking that turn based strategy is a sell for gamers.  What’s amazing about Xcom is that it not only plays like a great TBT title, it LOOKS like an A class game.  A lot of people may have played Laser Squad Nemesis, but likely not a lot of people were drawn in by the graphics who otherwise wouldn’t look at a TBT game.  The last serious TBT I played was Soul Nomad and the World Eaters after a long string of NiS titles since the legendary Disgaea hit the states.  Xcom is a far cry from the NiS games but the essentials are the same: you have a group of guys, they level up, they get better gear, they fight stuff in turn based mode.

Getting in on a good shooting

First, lets me get on about the stuff that’s not really all that important: the visuals.  This is window dressing for the core gameplay and while it can’t make the game it is a HUGE bonus in Xcom.  Firaxis uses the Unreal engine and it is just gorgeous.  All the effects look great, the physics are superlative and the destructable terrain is to DIE for in this genre.  We’re seeing things in Xcom (again, a TBT) that are normally in a top drawer FPS.  The camera work is fairly good during shots and criticals– I saw a few glitches here and there, but nothing gamebreaking.  This is, by far, the best looking TBT around.  What I was most worried about after Xcom Apocalypse is that the aliens in the new version would look like SHIT or just too comical to take seriously (like the blue ice cream guys or the walking asses).  I can say the aliens look excellent.  While not a fan of the ‘greys’ as a design, they did a great job with everything else.  They even go into explaining why there are so many different races invading the earth all unified– not something that was ever done in the old Xcoms.

Gameplay.  Firaxis made some decisions that at first concerned me a great deal.  First there is no inventory at all.  You don’t have a backpack filled with crap for each soldier and you cannot pick up anything on the ground during a fight.  Soldiers have a main weapon, a pistol and up to two extra items (either a medikit, stun gun, grenades or extra armor for the most part) depending on your class.

Secondly, your guys get two moves only.  That means you can’t move one square forward, move another square forward, etc.  You have to pick a square to move to and GO. You can move a second time, but again, you pick a square within your move range and go there.   For your shooting action, you either shoot first (and not take your movement at all) or move first, then shoot.

Both of these things seem shocking to Jagged Alliance veterans—but they do something that I highly respect: save time.   If you remember, missions in the old Xcom and map clearing in JA could take a long, long time.  Xcom’s new version drastically reduces the possible time spent on a mission, mostly due to the two major changes above.  You are not wasting time moving single squares with your guys, nor are you fuddling about with trying to determine if you can grab a grenade out of you backpack and still have enough action points to throw it.    This does remove some of the age old tactics of picking up alien tech and slapping it in your backpack (or alien corpses) or getting aliens to drop their weapons on a successful psionic control attack (yes Psionics are in the game).  However, the benefit far outweighs the loss of these age-old and rather beardy tactics in that you are done and on to the next mission.

Campaign.  The campaign game is engaging and tight.  There are cinematics for a lot of events and a set of cheracters that you interact with throughout who provide some added entertainment and give you a feel for what  is at stake.  I only played through the campaign twice, once losing pretty quickly before I understood the importance of countries panicking and leaving the Xcom project.  Once you get down to too few countries funding Xcom, the aliens basically take over and it’s game over.

Another interesting bit is that the aliens always abduct humans in multiple sites–so you have to choose where to take your guys to shoot them.  You can take easy missions (and should early on) with small rewards, or take difficult missions with more rewards.  Eventually you are forced to take the most difficult missions as the panic level in some countries becomes so great, you don’t have a choice but to take on that mission to lower the panic level.  Since, as noted above, missions go quickly, campaign game can go fairly quickly, unlocking new weapons (and facing new enemies) at a good clip.  While it’s key to allow the player to determine some of the pace in a TBS game, I found it a good mix of being forced to take action and having time to mull over decisions.

Soldier upgrades are simplified in that you choose a skill per advance.  These skills are very clear in gameplay, and you can tailor your guys to be pretty much exactly what you need at the time.   My only complaint here is that you will get some guys that can no longer advance as they have all the advances in their class tree.  This is minor as by that time, you are headed to the end of the game.

The Assault class was my favorite.

That said, Xcom is not an extremely long game where you are slugging through hours and hours of missions and side quests, there are distractions from the main quest, but you are always against the clock and have to start making your way to the end with some speed if you want to win.  As a responsible adult, I found this to be great as I could actually FINISH it.  Now back to the pile of unfinished games from 2011….

Beyond the Gates of Antares – new Rick Priestley sci fi miniatures game on Kickstarter soon

Some good painting there.

Well this is unexpected and pretty big news. I figured all the Ex-GW that went over to Warlord game would stick to the historical stuff as to not compete directly. Certainly Hail Caesar and Bolt Action are considered to be both excellent games but by the fact that they are historical, probably don’t appeal to the mass of gamers like 40K does.  Well the, why not try to take on their former masters with what looks to be a 30MM Sci Fi skirmish game called Beyond the Gates of Antares.

Given where 40K went after 2nd edition (that also fueled Necromunda) I was completely off the wagon.  While I have a small Eldar army and various sundries collected over the years, I have had no desire at all to play 40k, even 6th edition.  I believe GW has the skills to make  a great ruleset as evident by Warhammer Fantasy 8th, they did not go far enough with 6th edition to turn it back into something I’d be interested in playing.

That said, BOLT ACTION’s rules are pretty much exactly what people want out of a game– not too heavy, not too light, with impulse driven iniative rather than the fatal (in 40K’s current scale) IGOYOUGO mechanic.  I expect the new game to be similar.  They were on to something GOOD with AT43– it just didn’t work out well at the end due to balancing the armies out.  I will be throwing some cash at this kickstarter for the single reason that the rulebook will likely kick total ass if Rogue Trader is any indication.

Here is the link.

Inevitable Hobbit commentary (wherein the author uses the word “Lucasification”)

Ah… the Hobbit, my first foray as a grade-schooler into fantasy literature. I already knew the story a bit from the 70s movie (it came out in 1980 but is squarely in the 70’s for style) and some lord of the rings movie books that I had lying around, but reading the book as a little kid was both a challenge and a huge pleasure that lead to COUNTLESS (mostly lesser) sci-fi and fantasy novels to follow. It turns out that my dad was a closet Sci-fi freak and had boxes and boxes of paper backs like the Killer Thing and a lot of Ray Bradbury along with some Pel Toro. He was the one that turned me onto Tolkien in the first place and this path, started in the late 70’s led directly into D&D and basically the entire wonderful world of gaming (at that time on the fringe).

Before seeing the movie, I saw one of my co-workers walking out of the nerd store. She was buying a present for her cousin and would probably be the least likely individual to be coming out of the nerd store that I could imagine (looking quite like one of the forever21 models posted across the atrium). This present was a Hobbit card game of some sort and yet she had never seen the film nor read the book and this is where I think Peter Jackson had to make some hard choices about the Hobbit.

The Length
Stretching this rather short book into three films was shocking at first and remains shocking for a viewer that is familiar with the original book and 70’s film. I found a few small bits of the new Hobbit tediously long but this was made up by the fact that there were parts barely mentioned in the book that are getting the FULL treatment in the movie– and these are EXCELLENT parts of the story. Radaghast the Brown finding that Sauron has returned to Dol Gudor, the actual showing of the attack on Lonely Mountain by Smaug and the Orcs on Moria were all very well done and fun to see.

The Flashback
To my astonishment, the beginning of the Hobbit is actually the beginning of the Lord of the Rings (in the book) where Bilbo has a going away party and then disappears to Rivendell. So this sets up these films as a solid pre-quel to the LoTR stuff because the entire movie is one big series of flashbacks or stories the characters are telling to other stories.

Things that were great
Gollum. Fucking amazing. While the entire scene was different from how I pictured it in the book the tension level was fantastic. They nailed Gollum down beyond all expectations.  The way the ring was lost by Gollum was also very well done.

The Goblin King. While this entire sequence was Lucasified (see below), the Goblin king himself looked badass with his flesh beard and carbuncular skin. I was just very sad that he didn’t say the line: “Who are these miserable persons?” that I loved so well from the book. It must have been tough for Jackson to work through the Goblins actually not immediately killing the dwarves because, lets face it, in the other films they just attack and attack and attack all the time.

The Dol Godur back story.  We know from reading the Hobbit that Gandalf goes off from time to time to do stuff– once for a VERY long time.  The stuff he is doing is not important for the Hobbit story (other than the fact that he’s gone) but was vastly important when framed as a prequel to the Lord of the Rings.  He has to investigate and defeat either the return of Sauron in some form or the newly reformed Witch King of Angmar.  This is going to be super badass.

Things that weren’t so good
The escape from the goblin king – this was a ridiculous CGI sequence not unlike the newer star wars films. It puts the dwarves and gandalf at such odds and surviving so many near escapes from destruction fighting the goblins that the viewer can only conclude that they are completely immortal and free from harm. You just become numb to all the craziness on screen. Plus man, it’s tough to beat this:

Thorin almost getting killed- again, taking a quick scene from the book and expanding it to a really long scene is OK, as long as the resolution is somewhat consistent with the original intent. I understand that this scene was showing Thorin vs the ‘big bad guy’ and is the climax of the film, but why did we have to think he was dead? Why mess with the audience that already knows he will live?

The reason for this ‘almost death’ of one of the main characters, as I see it, is the type of viewer like my co-worker noted above that had never see the old movie, nor read the books. It’s that viewer that some of this stuff is targeting, not US nerds. For the climax, Thorin’s almost death adds drama and excitement and for most people this was likely needed. While the book is exciting, it’s not HOLLYWOOD exciting and to bring in the kids, all of the Lucasified scenes may have been necessary.  Unfortunately those were the  parts I loathed, both in the Hobbit and the Return of the King (where the mouthwash clean out of Minis Tirith by the ghosts was the worst offender).

It’s an Action film
It’s shocking for those of us that grew up with some very very different views on how the characters looked and how the ahem.. ACTION sequences went down that it is a bit shocking to see on screen.  We know Gimli and Aragorn are badasses– but you never got the impression that the dwarves from the hobbit were really that great at fighting anything.  They mostly got captured and run down only to be saved by Gandalf or Bilbo in the end time and time again.

Don’t let those things shake you out of seeing it though, the Hobbit rocked.

Marvel Heroic Roleplaying: First Session and random thoughts (feelings?!)

1981. You had a wank to this image.

Supers RPG Games.  What can I say about them briefly?  They are a guilty pleasure at best and at worst a one shot farce where people make characters that are walking beer mugs named Mr. Frothy.  Over the long years I’ve run the Hero System, TMNT and Champions and while they didn’t totally suck (TMNT, embarrassingly  was probably the best in play), each had their quirks.  The Hero system has a lot of “Math.”  Champions took forever to make a character build (our first experience with a points buy as kids) and the fights took a long, long time.   Even for us children, they were fun dalliances from the serious stuff like D&D and Call of Cthulhu (and Gamma World)–not the stuff of a long campaign.  Once the cynicism of the late 80’s set in along with Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, there was no going back to the genre. A Supers games was all fighting: there wasn’t much narrative other than punch the shit out of some Viper agents and take down Armadillo with a RKA before he has a chance to act.  While fun, the other factor was that your character didn’t build up with experience– they came out of the womb about as powerful as they were going to get.  I think very very few sessions of Supers games were played for these reasons, but we did spend much more time making characters.  Somewhere I have a pile of moulding character sheets for Champions with all the Xmen, Rom the Spaceknight and probably ridiculous characters like Devil Dinosaur and Kamandi (the last boy on earth you know).  This is where time was spent on these games, not the play itself.

However, in the last 20 years, two games hit the shelves that can only be described as Supers games: Feng Shui and Exalted.  in 2007, the capstone on the superhero genre hit the shelves in the form of Exalted 2nd Edition.  Think Exalted isn’t a supers game?  Look at it. Seriously.  While Exalted has it’s problems, some GLARING problems, the setting and the ability for a system to FEEL like you are playing an uber powered individual with nuanced power sets really put everything else I had played before back on the shelves (including Feng Shui). Everything in the “Supers” genre, from ICONS to Kerberos Club to the new Marvel Heroic Roleplaying is trying to capture that magic that Exalted brought to the table while trying NOT to fall into the traps Exalted did from a system perspective.

That said, now we are older and have responsibilities other than finding a dark corner to beat off in or making sure we actually eat something other than funyons during a given Summer day spent in a dank basement.  There’s no time to make characters, there’s barely time to PLAY a game, much less know the rules to the extent Champions/Hero system requires. And let’s not even get into the whole Exalted 2nd edition complications.   So we turn to FATE-like games with a focus on narrative and player-fiat rather than system heavy simulation.  While it uses what’s called the Cortex system, MHR is, in essence, FATE with the D&D dice (and lots of them).  This is not a bad thing.

While I had read the MHR rules once through and skimmed them again right before play,  I must admit, I was largely unprepared for being the GM (Watcher).  I understood what the Doom pool was, how dice pools were made for actions, but had a good deal of fuzziness around the nuances rules.  Of course, the first scenario is about the best I’ve read in a Supers game– all full on combat with other super villains– an asston of them pouring down.  In fact ,there are so many that mobs of them show up as Mooks and you can spend dice from the Doom Pool to ‘power’ up some out of this huge list of D-grade villains like Scarecrow, Mentallo and Tiger Shark in the back of the book.  I planned on the entire session being combat, and oh yeah, it was.  While some players shudder at session-long combats, don’t let that throw you off– it went surprisingly fast for what it was–a MAJOR throw down.  Running four major super heroes (Thor, Iron Fist, Iron Man and Wolverine) vs seven+ supervillains including one A-lister in the form of Carnage his bad self actually worked.   Trying to run seven villains and all their powers at once in the first session of a new game seems totally insane– and at first it was, but characters don’t have a ton of powers that you can’t remember at all (like Exalted), so you’re not overwhelmed.  It’s what you do with those powers both in the narrative and with your dice that make the difference (again, remember this is FATE-like).   I fucked up a few times, sure, like using Living Laser’s LIMIT on his power set as a power (stupid me) and not quite doing Count Nefaria’s powers right…but compared to running 6-8 mere Dragon Blooded in Exalted, it was a total cakewalk as a GM.

Given that the core system is essentially FATE, I must comment on the change in dice in MHR from the Fudge ones.  Unlike FATE, you have a dice pool that you build from your character sheet, from resources and assets (like a tire iron you picked up, or a tank you are about to throw in the case of the Thing) or enemy consequences.  You roll these dice and select two for your ‘to hit’ roll and select one die for effect.  The effect die number showing has no meaning, just the size of the die.  Your opposition rolls against that ‘to hit’ number to dodge or block, building a pool in the same manner you did to hit and also selects and effect die and a ‘to hit’ roll.  Essentially whoever gets higher gets to fuck the other character up– the only difference is that the attacker gets to do so for free and the defender has to spend a Plot Point to apply his effect.  This means the dreaded WHIFF factor is nearly gone– if you miss, chances are you are going to take some damage in return.  Players thought the counterattack mechanism was overpowered, but really, what it comes down to is a roll off and whoever wins can hit– attacker for free but with no information (dice haven’t been rolled) the defender ‘at cost’  but with all the information (dice are already rolled).

Damage takes the form of a die type and is either a consequence (like being wrapped in cabling) or some form of Stress (like FATE).  So, if you have D10 damage, that’s not only a track to see how fucked you are, but bonus die your opposition gets to roll against you.  Once it’s over D12, you are out of the scene and take some real damage.  Damage can happen FAST.  In the first exchange, if Thor hadn’t had a Plot Point to invoke his invulnerable power, he would have been one-shotted by Living Laser. The heroes were one shotting villains all over the place– and some of these guys were plenty ‘ard.  Like FATE, when you are in combat, things HAPPEN.

The dice pool mechanic was pretty quickly picked up by the players but it must have been crazy for them in the first hour or so.  They were able to build their pools quickly throughout the game– though I think it wasn’t exactly correct because though you can use a die from each ‘section’ of your character sheet, that doesn’t mean you are legally allowed to.  For example if you were trying to punch someone, you can’t use a “criminal master” D10 for your free trait die– it just doesn’t make sense.   My only complaint is that I hate D4’s: hate rolling them, hate reading the numbers off and hate stepping on the fucking things late at night. Otherwise the dicepool works really well.  It’s not as fast as FATE, but it doesn’t take forever and seems to squeeze out narration.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about the powers in the game.  Powers are called ‘Power Sets’ that include all special effects and a limit.  Most characters have but one power set, but some have 2-3.   The special effects are things like: “Remove your Stress die to the doom pool and step up your next attack effect die by one rank” and really represent the player’s powers in the game.  The Limit is some condition that shuts down the power set (like Iron Man having his armor power shut down by an EMP).  These limits were tough to integrate during the first play– I just didn’t know if I was supposed to show them to the players or not.  You do not play with a GM screen and nothing is hidden from the players so I would assume they could just look on the enemy sheets.  Again, the number of powers and effects are manageable and it’s possible to run a shitload of NPC’s with no problem: something that cannot be said for ANY other Supers game I’ve played.

Ok…there are a few A-listers that are pretty cool…

In summary, the first session was chaotic but showed a lot of potential for the system.  I need to run the game again (and explain the rules better to the group) to see if players get bored of the system and all the dice or if it stays fresh.  Like most other Supers games, there isn’t really any reason to use or get experience points– but they are there and there is some leveling up, but for the stock Marvel characters– who cares?  In short, MHR really this blows away Champions and the Hero system because I could sit down and run the game with little to no prep, much like FATE. With practice, I could probably make up villains on the fly during play.   The issue, creatively, is I’m not sold on and RPG based around MARVEL, you can’t really make characters easily and while the system isn’t tied to the setting all that much, who on earth has the time to make an alternate setting?  That said I will run this fucker again, despite the fact that the main characters have underwear with them on it that your kids would wear and lunchboxes and toys from the 70’s and are pretty much played out story wise (I never noticed how fucking LAME wolverine’s ‘Japanese’ backstory really was– oh the 80’s…) but it would be nice to get off the generic Marvel heroes in the book (FF, Xmen and Avengers,with the only B-listers being Power Man and Iron Fist) and onto stuff like the Lesbian Space Adventures of Phyla-Vell or you know… something closer to EXALTED.