It’s good.
Mraakbowl Finals!
The Skinny Dippers (Skaven) and Goatsee (Chaos) made it into the finals of the Mraakbowl.
The Norse team (top seed) was knocked out of the running after a hard fought 4-2 shoot out with the Skaven. While the Norse are arguably the worse team in Blood Bowl, their coach is arguably the best coach in this league to have brought them so far.
The Amazons, in contrast, are one of the better Blood Bowl teams, but just couldn’t stem the tide of Chaos, losing 2-0 in what amounted to a big frown from Nuffle on all of Amazonia and the inevitable questioning by the coach of the dodge skill’s existence if his ladies can’t dodge worth a damn. Chaos, on the other hand, was dodging up a storm with everyone on the team as if they had greased themselves up with pig-fats. Shockingly, none of the Chaos team made the leaderboard for most casualties inflicted, a sad state of affairs that will likely be rectified during the Mraakbowl Final.
Stay tuned to see whether or not Nuffle favors the Horned Rat or He who sits on a Brass Throne atop a Mountain of Skulls.
Gygax memorial in Lake Geneva
Better than my imagined tourist trap “Home of Dungeons and Dragons,” which would likely have Hasbro lawyers swarming the area until it was shut down, land has been granted for a memorial to Gary Gygax in Lake Geneva.
DarkSpore – Saving the Investment
remember spore? remember the hype? will wright makes new super game!!! a game that lets you take a single cell organism and evolve it to a space fairing race! i remember. i bought it. i played it. it fucking sucks. the game is trash, i would not recommend you try it. even will wright left ea after making it. i believe he left because spore never became what he truly wanted it to be, something that had a foundation in cool science that let people play with the stuff of life. instead it became a shitcakeburger that was not fun to play because it never challenged the player in cool ‘HOLY SHIT SCIENCE’ ways. the game was dumbed down into a “sims with creatures” borefest.
so what is EA(ss) to do with all the money the dumped into the spore brand? how can EA(ss) cash in on this failed product to help re-coop the investment? FUCK!?! make a action rpg using the spore brand! that’s what. arpg players are desparate! they are all awaiting diablo 3 and will buy ANYTHING to help fill the void and quench the thrust.
take a shitty brand, a poison root, and make something awesome from it. what a fucking terrible idea. enter darkspore.
darkspore launched april 26th 2011 for $50 and now it’s on sale for $30. not even too months later and the game is 40% off. fucking shitty. having played the beta, i can tell you the game is worth 5-10$ and even at that price you’ll stop playing after 3-5hrs because there is nothing there to play. it’s a grind fest of epically shittackular proportions. argps may not need a story, but damnit it HELPS A LOT!!!
it pains me to think about all the talent in the game industry that slaved away to make spore and then darkspore. all the hours put into games that are not worth using for entertainment because they are not fun.
Bulldogs funded!
Looks like my first Kickstart backing has made it’s mark and is going to press shortly. While this one worked out, the Kickstart system is essentially ‘pledge to buy it before it exists’ which is a huge risk of something totally sucking ass. You don’t get charged until the funding goal is met so you’re covered if it doesn’t make it’s funding (and most projects on there don’t). I think a few lessons from watching this and some other projects–have your shit close to done, if not totally done, so you can show off pieces to people and let them know that “hey this is not just an idea, this is something real, we just need funding to publish it or get through X phase.” Artwork is also key at the funding stage. If you can put together some good comps that spark the imagination in people, the cash is probably going to flow pretty well. One kickstart I saw had a description of “I don’t want anyone to steal the idea” which is silly because HUNDREDS of people have had the same idea and will probably not get it executed. Needless to say, that had no funding at all.
So I’m looking forward to seeing the Bulldogs book and will be checking Kickstart for good stuff which I’ll post. The awesome thing is that this system totally circumvents the current publishing system while allowing people to not have to take out big loans or self-fund their (good) ideas.
Comic/Culture blog ’84-’91: the “Copper Age”
As, the so-called “Copper Age” basically encompasses my Junior High School through High School years, I find Very Fine / Near Mint to be entirely engrossing with it’s period comic coverage and music and wrestling videos. As much as I am a kid of the 70’s and shamefully look back to ALL that stuff with pure unabated nostalgia (even when so much of it was crap), I have an entirely cynical view of anything that even slightly approached crap during the “copper age.”
That said, what happened in ’92 to make the cut off for this period ’91? I certainly remember getting back to college in the fall of ’92 and noticing a distinct change in the kids on campus, clothing, music, attitudes as if the grown ups were suddenly gone. For the focus of this blog especially–Image Comics hit the comic world like the Thing’s knock out punch-a hit we’re still feeling to this day; and of course no one could really look fondly the same way at Poison or Motley Crue videos after Nirvana came around.
Some Sludge
I’ve been dabbling in a lot of Sludge recently and thought I’d share. Note they get more grimy and naughty as you go down the list.
Some more time with Brink
I got in a few more hours this wweek (not nearly enough!), and I have some initial thoughts and, gods forgive me, feelings. Of course I’ve been reading the rather mixed reviews–some good, some bad and a lot that note that the game had/has a lot of potential that it didn’t live up to. Granted there was a lot of hype about this game as it was being published by Bethesda and used id Tech for the engine and expectations for something awesome was high.
I didn’t even start the campaign at first as I wanted to get as much multiplayer as possible–and also complete some of the excellent challenge mode missions. The challenge missions are all quite fun. There are only four types (variable objectives, parkur, escort and tower defense) and each gives a ton of unlocks when completed. They are difficult without being impossible, and they expose the nuances of the gameplay that I missed jumping directly into multiplayer and just shooting everyone. The parkur challenges are the best and I expect to see tons more puzzle missions like this going forward, even some Parkur races would be fun in this engine.
Gameplay is pretty frantic, but not as twitchy as UT3 or Quake as movement rates are much slower. It’s difficult to run and gun by design, though the game certainly encourages constant movement. There are no gibs and no blood that I saw and one major difference from other games (and the first time I’ve seen this in multiplayer): health regenerates. iI you get shot up and run away and hide, your health comes back after a time as if all the characters in the game were little Wolverines. In addition, when you do get capped, you have a choice, you can either wait for a medic to rez you, or ‘sign up’ to be in the next reinforcement wave (hits about every 15 seconds). So if a big massacre happens, it can occur that your whole team is back in the respawn area. This gives an interesting flow to the game, one the jury is still out on for me due to what I’ve seen most in the multiplayer: Spawn camping.
Even the bots do it. A couple nights ago I was playing against two other guys, and so the server was filled with bots. Once we closed the other team off in their base, the bots hung around right there and built turrets (like 4 of them over the course of the map) and with the exception of the human players who were filled with hijinks (of course), the opposing bots were mowed down as soon as they left their spawn.
And that’s an issue with Brink, not a bad one really because it allows you to play any time without having a full slate of human players, but an issue nonetheless. If you jump on a server with 2-3 people– the server automatically fills the empty slots with a ton of bots all over the place, so it’s very difficult to tell what the game is really like with all real, human people. I have yet to get on a full server filled with only human beings– that’s going to be the true test of the game. As most human-only servers are full all the time, you end up fighting the bots… a lot.
I did get to the campaign a bit and no sir, I don’t like it. The bots all crowd around objectives, running all over outside of cover, not working together except to attack en masse, just shooting while standing in the open and tossing grenades. After 2 missions (about 15-20 minutes each), I was pretty tired of it. The bots on your side don’t help when they should and sometimes seem totally godlike on the other side at times. Added to the fact that most maps have a single big firefight in one central area of 2-3 rooms for most of the game time doesn’t help either. Brink is not a game that you should buy for the single player. While the challenge missions are really fun, the campaign itself is simply the multiplayer maps with bots and a short intro, and the latter is a lot better with actual human players. Like Battlefield/BF2142– I would have scrapped single player all together if this is what it’s going to be like, instead, since they do have bots, just make it so you can play multi-player matches against bots.
Yet another Talisman Expansion!
I’ve gotten in only a couple plays since the Sacred Pool expansion (they were great games and it’s a solid edition to the game) and now we have an announcement of the next Talisman expansion, not city— not Timescape: DRAGONS! With the 2nd edition Dragon expansion setting records for prices for ink printed on cardboard, I can see why FF would take on this subject. Their take on it looks very different from both 2nd and third editions, no big tower in the middle of the board (but a new board space to replace the center region), no giant corner section to further balkanize the game, and, because it’s Fantasy Flight, looks like a boatload of tokens. Six new characters are included, looks like a Dragon Hunter, a Dragon Priestess, some sort of barbarian, what looks like a Harpy and an elf with strange pants.
I don’t get in enough games of Talisman, granted, it’s a 3-4 hour game but I’m hoping when this comes out, I’ll be able to get in a game or two out of pity from the game group for my purchase…