Rough reviews on Brink

Brink, a new TF2/Monday Night Combat style FPS from the creators of Quake Wars and Wolfenstein Enemy Territory, has hit the shelves today with much hype and happenstance– and then some brutal ass reviews! The synopsis from reviews so far (some posted at 12:01 AM): single player sucks ass, it’s got some broken maps due to choke points in multiplayer and some weirdness with unlocks and team roles. Ok, not to defend a game that just came out and could be shitty, but how long did these guys actually play it? How many times have we heard this in games like TF2 or BF2142 with new maps, new weapons, patches that X tactic doesn’t work any more or ‘because they made X change to this class, this map is impossible to win on for the Attackers!” Then a month later people trying to defend the same map will say–“oh this is impossible to defend now because the attacker just does X to win.” I seem to remember some similar criticisms leveled at TF2 early on, though no one now can say anything but it’s a ‘living’ classic of a game even with all of it’s fucking HATS. Again, I’m not saying Brink is on the same level, but I think that some reviewers may look back and rue the early reviews they did: oh except it made their site some ad revenue right?

Despite all the negative press, I’m really looking forward to getting into this one due to the core gameplay, i.e.: jumping around like a jack ass all over an urban environment while shooting guns.

Guardian Heroes coming to XBLA!

Remember, if you ever go to sell back a video game at one of the various intake centers and it’s worth more than 20$– don’t sell it back.  I learned this the hard way specifically due to this game.  Note the sound isn’t too good.  It is the Saturn, 1995, so that’s to be expected (Though the PSX sounded great).

The Mraaking Blood Bowl League

After much ado ado, we finally got an even number of players for the Mraaktagon Blood Bowl league (not with miniatures this time but via the Legendary Edition online).  Here are the teams.

Steveformer – Amazons

Sensless – Skaven

Littlemute – Chaos

Nodamage – Undead

Turftoe – “High” Elves

Ultrasmurf – Norse (!?)

My guess for the winners? We have two heavy hitting teams and four agility/passy teams (yes the Skaven are a bit of both).
High Elves and Skaven in the final. High Elves 3, Skaven 2.

Anathema with Lunars and Abyssals (and Sidereals) oh my!

Not that anyone truly understands how they work, but here they are.

Ok well my job as a GM just got a shitload easier.  Exalted antagonists are troublesome to create at best and extremely time consuming at worst.  While appreciate some of the other efforts to digitize the creation process, Anathema has by far the best usability and resulting character sheets, but has been stuck with Solars and Dragon Bloods for years now– many years actually, due to the original development team backing away from the project.  Well, as hinted in an over-exuberant post last summer, Anathema 2.0 has been released and includes Abyssals and Lunars AND Sidereals.  I’m just grabbing it now to give it a go.

In addition to having the new splats integrated, ANATHEMA is the place that best collates all the extra charms for Solars and DB’s into one handy dandy program.  So if you are just a player (and I envy you if you are because you get the easy part) this is still worth a download.   You will need to procure or enter your equipment data in the system still, and the charms have no text (just page numbers in whatever tome contains them), but still it’s quite an asset for players as well as GMs.

 

King of Fighters 13 announced for Console (finally!)

This is make or break time for SNK as a purveyor of the fighting games. KOF 12, while it looked and played awesome was extremely stripped down and was missing some key features (no win poses at the end? no end boss? missing moves for characters? for shame!).  Despite the gripes, the fighting engine for KOF 12 is extremely solid and fun.   Always more of a fan of KOF than Street Fighter, there’s been a worry, and a very persistent one based on the news in the last year, that SNK was done with fighting games and was going to focus on their pachinko machines (we’ve heard this before too).  However, KOF 13 has been in arcades for almost a year and people are just flat out loving it. The super-solid gameplay of KOF, updated with what feels alot like Garuo Mark of the Wolves influences and all new hand drawn sprites a la Blazblue make this a must have.  Here is more on the scoop.

 

A Game of Thrones

I’ve known about this series for a long time now but never picked it up until last week spurned on by the “get to it before Hollywood does” mantra. I’ve had my doubts as so much fantasy in book form is just absolute tripe. Fafrd and The Grey mouser, Elric stuff, LoTR, Wizard of Earthsea and a couple of the Warhammer novels (I think actually only Konrad) is all I’ve been able to stomach from the genre. I don’t count John Gardner’s Grendel as that falls so far into the literature realm that it’s not even in the Fantasy section in bookstores.

As for Game of Thrones, The first couple chapters are rather weak, especially the prologue, and I felt I was getting into a generic fantasy novel the exact opposite of what I want to be wasting my very limited reading time on. This year so far I’ve read Suttree, Blood Meridian (for the second time) and The Far Side of the World (book 10 of the Master and Commander series). Except for the last one, those are some weighty acts to follow. Certainly, Game of Thrones is not literature, and you won’t be wowed by Hardy-esque descriptions of the Winterfell environs, or challenged by post modern discourses on language, but by chapter 3, the vast number characters, subplots and plots began unfolding and you realize sheer scale, and it really starts to rock and roll. The pacing is excellent and I think that’s what’s going to keep me reading. If I can squeeze in a chapter here and there– things happen and happen fast.

As for the show– it’s gotten glowing reviews from both critics and the impossible to please fans. I’m rarely one to say anything I read is great (except for say, Blood Meridian or Grendel; which are simply titans of modern literature) but Game of Thrones is solid stuff that ha yet to ring my cheese-bag fantasy bell.

Warhammer Fantasy Battle – Storm of Magic: July

probably no dwarf wizards

WFB 8th edition kicks total ass.  I’ve mentioned this before, and I will continue to keep reiterating it.  Other than Blood Bowl, which is the best thing Games Workshop has ever and will ever create, WFB 8th edition is a solid second place: it’s better than Necromunda (gasp!), better than Man O’ War (I would be throttled for saying this in some quarters of our fair city) and, as always, it’s the better game between it’s cool but not so fun to actually play Warhammer 40K.

That said, it’s getting close to a year since 8th edition came out, and we have only a single army book that’s ‘official’ and one just announced (Tomb Kings).  Granted the Skaven and Beastmen books were written as crossovers from 7th to 8th and work just fine, but there hasn’t been all that much out for the game in the last (almost) year.  There was supposedly a big announcement for the summer, and this could be it: just announced is not another army book (which we need) but a ‘Storm of Magic’ expansion that extends the magic phase and adds in what appears to be some bigger, more powerful MONSTRARS.   Given that my last game I shocked and awed my opponent as my measly lvl 1 Bray Shaman transformed in to an 8’s across the board Greater Red Dragon FTW, I guess— bring on the MONSTRARS!   In addition, it’s pretty obvious from reading some 5000 per side plus battle reports that the magic system (while great) does not scale up when there are half a dozen or more spellcasters on the table per side.  I’m looking forward to it and damn I still have so much to paint…

Reading about this announcement across the interwebtubes you really get the impression that long time Warhammer players love nothing better than to complain about every possible thing.  I just want to shake some of these guys and remind them that in the 70’s and early 80’s NOTHING like what Games Workshop has created and maintained was even close to existing.  Everything miniatures-wise pre-Citadel (i.e.:. before the mid 80’s) was pure shit on toast.  If you think differently, you have your nostalgic head straight up your pre-gen-x butthole!

Rule of the day!