Mad Max!!

Holy Fuck. That was film of the year. Like an exultation to the gods of War and crash up derbies.   The film blew the doors off of anything I’ve seen in years.  Like matt said: ‘they knew what they had to do and they did it.’  Despite all the violence, it wasn’t a gorefest and only had a small bit of nudity (from a distance even). There was one gross-out scene to really solidify the bad guys as real cunts, but that’s about it.  Don’t want to spoil anything by writing too much, so go see it now!

Also, it was an awesome representation of 80’s brit-punk styling throughout. Despite some shit-assed 3d glasses I had, I’m going to need to see it again and again.  Too bad I sold off my set of Dark Future… oh wait, that’s right, the rules sucked.

dark future

Black Angel

Scott sent me this. Some film that shown before Empire Strikes Back in the UK that was lost ever since. All in line with cheesy fantasy from the 80’s except it’s very Tarkovskyesque.

Feng Shui 2 looks gorgeous!

I kickstarted this for the love of Feng Shui and the Zman/Daedelus Shadowfist.  I got the beta-PDF early and just didn’t have time to go through it.  Recently the real-deal PDF has come available and I’m just starting to crack open the rule system. I thought it would be near exactly the same, but there’s a lot more going on than before.  The few of you that played with me years ago, it was all about the single action value– say you had Guns 17, that was pretty much your most important stat (a bit like Diablo 3’s failed design with only DPS making any difference at all) and while the game was never boring to play, there was no true difference in characters with a couple exceptions.  Also the stunting sucked in retrospect, but at the time it was a really awesome new mechanic.  The new version seems to have a ton more going on with each character archtype, of which there are TWENTY SIX.

Here’s a shot of the Big Bruiser.  As soon as things settle down again, I’ll be grabbing people to play this either on Roll20 or IRL.

Fengshui2big

Post-modern Westerns!

The Western genre ain’t dead, it just needs some creativity applied to it.

hateful-8-poster

Hateful 8.  Getting close!  I’m glad Tarantino went through with this after the script leak.  This will be glorious.

bone-tomahawk

Bone Tomahawk.  Looks BADASS and I do believe it is a horror/weird West tale (check the lower right part of the image…those aren’t Apaches!).

 

Finding deals!

I walked into a game store that I haven’t been in for many many years, if ever (I can barely remember) and it was a religious experience.  This was a real game store with new board games that were vastly outnumbered by old ones of every kind you can imagine.  I perused the shelves and among the stacks found a copy of Warrior Knights: Crown and Glory expansion, which has been out of print since 2009.  I haven’t been able to find it for a decent price for years.  I picked it up for retail at 20$, but it goes for $70-120 still in the shrink online.   Sweet right? But the problem is, I don’t like the Fantasy Flight version of Warrior Knights very much. Both times playing it was a bit of a chore– like a bad version of Shogun or Wallenstein.   However, from what online nerds say, the expansion is essential to making the game good and the base game should never be played with out it.  I’m at a bit of an impasse.  With similar titles that I know play well, like Fief and even Game of Thrones (not a very good game, but easy to pull out because people know the backstory), Warrior Knights would be tough to get on the table.  What’s more I have the old ’87 Games Workshop version to boot!  So sell it, or keep it in the shrink– or play the fucker?

The point of this post is to note what an actual game store should be like.  Front face has new stuff everywhere, this is the stuff that will flow through the store like MTG and Dead of Winter and various 7 Wonders and Catan expansions with whatever RPG’s are hot enough to be on the shelves (likely soon dominated by 5th Edition based on feedback), but I see no reason to have a large area for old ass games, RPG’s and general gaming crap to sell, and to have a trading system for gamers to get rid of their old stuff.  Because game stores usually do not occupy prime commercial real estate, as they are destination stores that people will go out of their way to go to, the pressure that everything on the shelves has to flow out of the store within a month can’t be too high?

While focusing more on old stuff, this place I was at today is the type of store Napoleon’s down in Milwaukee used to be like.  They had an area in the store where they would place stuff that they had bought from people or traded, and sold them at fair or low prices.  Checking that every few weeks was nearly always a gold mine.  For example, I got an entire first edition wood elf blood bowl team for 15$.  I picked up a stack of old modules for basic D&D for a song as well.  Store was happy, they made cash, I was happy as I got something not easily found. This is good.

Battlefleet Gothic TEASE

My question when seeing this and the fact that Total War: Warhammer is coming out soon is when will the Games Workshop IP exceed in popularity the entirely derivative work by Blizzard Entertainment. Starcraft is played out, Diablo 3 was a complete mess from the story perspective and there hasn’t been anything original from them…ever really. Warcraft 3, for all it’s awesomeness, is just a derivative of Warhammer in the end.

GW has had some strange and capricious relationships with development houses and video gaming in the past, and who knows what the future will bring. Looking at this trailer though we are reminded that while Blizzard has the copy-cat Samwise, GW has both John Fucking Blanche AND Jes HOLY FUCK THAT’S AWESOME Goodwin.

 

 

and the retraction

So look, the Mod selling seems like a good idea.  I don’t think it’s particularly bad or evil–that’s a natural extension of the Steam Workshop and people put hundreds of hours into their mods that we enjoy and would likely push some cash to.  The people that made the original game legally need to get paid in this situation too, and Steam itself.  Seems all logical, but I can see where things would go terribly wrong, and did.  Now that the gaming internet (at least the lords and masters of the glorious race of PC gamers) exploded with vitriol over the IMPLEMENTATION of money for Mods on Steam and the retraction has happened quickly.  I think if they work on the implementation, this may actually work out fine.

The thing that this should teach us is this:

1) Valve isn’t evil.  And if they don’t have more money than they know what to do with already, I’d be absolutely shocked.

2) Bethesda isn’t evil.  They are in a much more tenuous position than Valve, so they need to make money.  One bad Elder Scrolls (which I don’t think could happen based on what I know about the company), not including the MMO, could tank their studio.  These guys have to squeeze the lemon as hard as they can to even survive.  They just need to watch out for stooping to Zynga style shit…

3) We matter as consumers.  As shitty people saying shit on the shitty internet we really don’t, but since we, of the GLORIOUS RACE of PC GAMERS are consumers of everything steam, voting with our money or the threat of it his a huge incentive not to collectively piss us off.

My simple solution?  Put a DONATE button on mods and the original software developer and steam take a single, small cut each transaction.  Will people still steal other people’s mods? Probably, but it solves a major problem just slapping a donate button on there.