MRAAKTAGON – Page 88

GenCon 2011

I actually made it to the Con this year, family in tow just off a weekend+ of strep throat for me and the missus as well as my car getting totaled in a t-bone on the way to work. We were crossing our fingers up to the last minute that the one uninfected shorty in the family would stay healthy and she did: in her body at least. After 5-6 hours at Gencon, I will never be sure if she’ll be right again. As any attendee is well aware, some of the things viewed there can never, ever be unseen. There was one moment of almost-regret when, while being dragged through the morass in the dealer hall by her and her cousin, we essayed into a dank waft a malodor the likes of which neither of their young, unblanched olfactory organs had experienced before. While I winced and imagined the sort of lifestyle choices that accompanied such a reek, they just pushed on, dragging me to whatever corner of the dealer hall their fancy took them.

Saturday I was free from the burdens of unprotected sex and I while I missed the Shadowfist world championship by 23 minutes, it gave me ample time to wander around and get some demos and shop. Here are some of the results I can remember.

Ventura: new game by Fantasy Flight dealing with the Condotierre period in Italy. Interesting take on the whole ‘hexes make up the board’ mechanic that Nexus Ops, Kings and Things and Twilight Imperium use. You draw and lay the tiles nearest your own controlled area, so the board builds out form a conflicted center. All and all, an easy, fairly elegant area control game that I would have picked up immediately had the price point not been… drum roll please: 80$ ! That’s what I would expect to pay for a big box hobby game like Descent or Ikusa. While it seemed like a good game, the price point is going to crush it.

Blood Bowl League Manager: An insta-buy when it comes out, this was the belle of the ball for me. I was highly skeptical they would be able to pull this off, and they did! It’s a little deck building a bit of bluffing, some luck and the most important part: they integrated the block dice really well into the whole game mechanic. Essentially, you have a deck of your players and you play them on different games that make up a season. It’s abstracted but essentially represents you pulling out all the stops for a game with a player position for whatever effect in that game. If you have more strength than the opponent for each game, you win and get whatever benefits the game provides. This could be more player cards, some team special abilities or special coaches (or just fan factor). Whoever has the most fan factor at the end of the league wins. Looks like it can scale with players and really easy to play a short game or a really long campaign. Can’t wait to get my hands on this one. FF ran out of their 300 copies on Friday morning, or so I heard. Damn.

Rune Age: Another new one from Fantasy Flight. I half-heartedly tried to get into a demo of this but after looking over someone’s shoulder and seeing how Dominion-esque it was, I took a pass. Some will like this a lot. Unless someone says it’s not like Dominion at all, I’ll take a pass on this one.

Talisman Dragons: it was there, but after the 10 hours worth of games a few weeks back, I was just not ready to pick this up yet. Definite purchase, just later in the Fall.

Shopping. I was tentatively looking for some Dreamblade stuff and it was found only at one booth and fairly expensive. I missed last year’s con, but there was plenty around in 2009 to be had, mostly for a song. It’s a solid area-control miniatures game and with the figures super cheap, no reason not to pick up a bunch. As they ramp up in price; not so much.

AT-43 was also on my list, and I found one booth with a couple of very cheap items I needed, and another booth with a bunch that was half off retail, but still expensive for my tastes. Again in 2009 there was a ton to be had (mostly due to Fantasy Flight’s liquidation) but that well has very much dried up. AT-43 is an excellent game and I’m quite close to having a Therian and Red Block army of some size to meddle with. Along with AT-43 is the old 3.5 Confrontation stuff– amazing minatures for the most part and one booth had a bunch, but they just didn’t have anything I really needed. I may be kicking myself someday for not breaking the bank picking some of it up. The main issue is, I paint so slowly the stuff will sit in boxes for a decade before a brush hits it at all.

Warhammer: I found a booth that had TONS of bits and I will be hitting that every year that they make it. I would literally spend the whole con going through their shit. They didn’t have anything exceptionally old, but had a mess of stuff for any and all of the big box GW games (Necromunda, Blood Bowl, BFG, Man O War, etc).

Sadly, I didn’t buy a single ‘new’ game to say, like most years, “a ha! I got this at Gencon, we must play!” This is due to blood bowl league manager being sold out and Ventura– well 80$ was just too much to spend.

gencon2011 008 — "I'm not sure what that smell was my childe, let's move on quick!"

Shadowfist. Though I missed the nationals Saturday morning, I did make it to the invite-only tournament for past tournament winners, which started right after the morning tournament final concluded after a 4 hour final! I was able to pull out the win after getting a tie in my first game, winning my second game after a long slough (thank you petroglyphs!) and winning in short order the three man final. In the final against ascended and architects (least that’s what I saw), I started strong and got a High Noon face off using a foundation character (thank you Yellow Senshi Chamber!) and a ring of gates out (protecting from stuff going back into my hand which my deck hates). The Ascended player laid out bull market (5 power to all players) as a response to the end of my turn, allowing me the power to lay out a site and be at play and take for my next turn. Then he announced that he had gotten all Feng Shui in his draw. Now, getting all Feng Shui at a time like that really sucks, but to announce it in the final of a tournament–it basically said to both myself and the other player that he was pretty much out of denial cards and we needed to go for the win. The Architect player to my right brought out some little stuff, but couldn’t take a site (thank you Final Brawl!) and after gaining 4 power in addition to the 5 from the Bull Market, I was able to lay out a foundation character, a Big Brusier and have a power left for a confucian stability to stop the inevitable zzzzzap (which came in the form of an Op Killdeer). Going for the win, the brusier got redirected onto a 9 body site (he’s only 8 fighting) , but my foundation character’s damage was redirected onto that 9-body site via the yellow senshi chamber, reducing it to a feastable number for the big brusier, for which the table had no answer. All in all, I got real lucky with my draws and was able to capitalize on both the bad luck of the other players as well as some mistakes on their part.

The deck list is here.

My MVP cards:

Character: Big Bruiser

Event: Blue Meditation

Edge: Shield of Pure Soul

Feng Shui: Petroglyphs

State: none in deck

After winning this and the Wisconsin state championship this year after many years of tournaments of just barely not making it into the finals, I’m looking at a long decade or so of getting my ass handed to me in competitive play as I well deserve. Bring it!

d2 hardcore mraakairy – part 9- another one bites the dust

shoedrinker got the permadeath from a pack of assholes on the last seal opening sequence before diablo shows up. it was that pack of fast demon fuckers. i got nervous and cornered and killed. see that fast pack must be avoided at all costs and drawn out into the large open area, and AND you must have your avoid skill handy, i might have been able to leap to safty but my leap skill was buried somewhere… death came pretty damn fast.

just when i was thinking i’d get my first hardcore diablo fight, FUCKED. i think the other characters i have will get a bit of the grinding before they make an attempt.video of shoedrinker going lv20-26 here.

rest in peace shoedrinker

d2 hardcore mraakairy – part 8 – wolfman

here is somecallmetim, the druid.

i respected him with the plugy mod once or twice so i could PUMP more points into werewolf shit. i thought at first the wolf form was terrible, but found out i just needed a FASTER weapon with some lifesteal and BANG, werewolf guy started to kill some shit! i’ve got a couple summons to help keep the hoard off my back, but mostly i just use the werewolf skill that adds life steal charge up for the first three attacks and then lasts for 20 seconds or some shit, that life steal plus your base life steal from weapons makes a nice punchy dude. also you get a speed bonus so you can run faster which in diablo 2 is WHAT YOU FUCKING WANT, you want to run around as FAST as possible.

funny thing, the temple vipers almost fucking killed me. AGAIN! fuck though guys man. fuckem.

video of boss kills HERE.

unomoralez

Best of the Master series gets a much needed reprint!

Released yesterday, IKUSA is the new name for Milton Bradley’s master system triumph Shogun (later Samurai Swords) produced now by WOTC. I guess I should have sold my unpunched version of Samurai Swords a few years back eh!? While this is a must have, I feel this game has been somewhat eclipsed by Dirk Henn’s Shogun. To be sure, these are two very different games. Herr Henn’s is a Euro take on the conflict and Samurai Swords/IKUSA is at the absolute apex of Ameritrash goodness. Both are great in their own way, but Ikusa is longer, much more random and it’s objectives are to wipe the other players out as is the way with Ameritrash. One has a cube tower and one has little plastic swords and the backfiring ninja! I can’t help but love both.

Summer Reading: The Unfortunate Traveller

I did my time in college trying to get an English minor and why I don’t know, I knew I sucked real bad at the style of deconstructionist writing that got all sorts of ate up by most of the professors I had. What’s more, lots of the kids in class had been actually exposed to the literary criticism quarterlies in high school while I, thankfully, had not. The quarterlies is where professors from all over the place argue in the most exclusionary language possible outside of a medical journal over minutiae regarding subtextual male marginalism within some unfortunately phrased sentence from Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland. As a student, you have to read stuff that and write about it. You don’t write about the actual original text at all, only about the body of work out of these literary quarterlies surrounding the original text. I turned in at least two papers that got passing grades without ANY familiarity with the original work outside of contextual inference from the quarterlies. Once you start down the deconstructionist path, your brain is always thinking in those modes when reading anything light and especially when plowing over something heavy: and this is madness. My cure right after college was to read everything William S. Burroughs published I could get my hands on as quickly as possible– you cannot possibly deconstruct cut-ups from say Soft Machine or The Ticket that Exploded (there is no illusion of complete understanding to undo). I found that Burroughs stood in absolute defiance of the paradigm of literary criticism I fell into (oh ya know, only as an undergraduate) and just blasted that shit away from my brain forever so as I could go back and read my Thomas Hardy for enjoyment and not to figure out if he was writing out of some cultural paradigm that needs to be studied (which of course he was and it does, but not by me).

However, I don’t regret as it was a good, though ultimately pointless, mental exercise to be sure; the bonus was exposure to original works that I came to love and have gone back to many a time. John Gardner’s Grendel, The Virginian and what I’m eeking through for the third time over the summer: Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller. This is not an easy read, Latin all over the place, extremely archaic language left and right, page upon pages of ‘what the hell is he talking about’ abound, but I believe this is the first picaresque in the English language, and may even be the first novel. The book is about a page named Jack Wilton who is telling his stories to a group of people in a public house. He has a bunch of random adventures, some which applies his cunning (convincing a captain he hates during a siege to surrender to the French and tell them he is trying to kill the King, acts which get the captain instantly hanged) and others he just observes (a peasant religious uprising that is put down harshly in Wittenburg). I compare it most to The Golden Ass by Apuleius (where a guy porks a ‘witch in training’ and gets caught and in trying to turn into an owl to escapte, turns himself into a donkey), except with Jack Wilton, there is no apotheosis, no redemption and in a way, no essential meaning to the stories he experiences– he just sees crazy stuff, rips people off here and there, and gets himself into some bad trouble (almost used as a cadaver in some experiment). That’s it, it’s the stories themselves that hold their own meaning individually, and Nashe goes to town in some of them with scathing social commentary, but no overall point to the whole work exists. If you’ve read The Golden Ass, and leave off the last chapter (which sucked anyway) where Lucius turns back into a human and becomes a priest of isis, that’s about what you’ll get when you finish The Unfortunate Traveller, but the road there is filled with the comedy of pillage and freaks and bloodbaths that only a picaresque can deliver.

d2 hardcore mraakairy – part 7 – easy time for paladin

daylabor proved to be a easy to use character even for a player that doesn’t really have any clue what the best paladin build looks like. i used holy fire mostly and then zeal and a bit of the fire resistance at in the MC esure place. pretty much you just run around punching shit until it is dead. i enjoyed the paladin and i feel at home with a punch non-ranged character. there were a couple close calls here and there, mostly the lighting enchanted shit, OF COURSE.

here’s daylabor stats and gear,

and here’s a link to the bastard in action.

top 5 from the wave

Though with Google+ around, it’s tough to see support for Google Wave continuing too long now, and it will be missed. Here’s a set of the top 5 links from the last week from very mraaking wave. Some are NSFW–probably the minecraft one as well because if you start playing it may not be safe for your worklife for a couple weeks.

a collection of henti word bubbles. Another gif that keeps on giving.

Ramona Flowers Vs The Thing

Rocket Raccoon in MvC3 Ultimate(!?)

Lots of strange choices were made in terms of characters for Marvel Vs Capcom 3 (Modok, She-Hulk?!) and the trend continues but it’s strange GOOD instead of strange BAD as the list was leaked for MvC Ultimate. While a fun game, I just could not get past the new style graphics. Instead of growing on me after detesting them as my first impression, I continued to find them shittier and shittier with every play. I don’t know what that style is called making everything look like it’s lit up superbright (yet at night) but whatever it is, it just didn’t do it for me. That said, the addition of Rocket Raccoon to the series roster is quite shocking. As a poster child for obscure (while not indy) Copper age comics, it’s tough for me to imagine anyone but a few people even remembering the character. I imagine there are some people that play fighters that are in their late 30’s– so this might be targeted at those few that do remember (as well as the equally surprising Iron Fist) as you have to be pretty damn old to have picked up the Rocket Raccoon stuff on the comic rack at the drug store (I was in 4th grade).