FF’s Nexus Ops preview posted

If you already have the Avalon Hill version of the  game, like the glow in the dark figures and don’t think the gameplay needs to change at all, other than hoping for a steep drop in price for the old version to pick up a copy, what would entice you to buy the new version?  New variants and components to support those variants is a likely answer.  In FF’s preview post, they detail the Vortex variant that moves around the map (a bit like the storm in Dune) and can pick up units and place them around the board, incinerate some and give energize cards to players who have stuff nearby where it lands that survive.  Not a bad little random chaos thrown in– the key is if you can score VP’s somehow by using the vortex to your advantage.

Something is odd though– take a look at how the home mining areas are placed on the board with one hex hanging off– this is quite different from the old version that has them flipped the other way in a 4-player game.

FATE! first session

I got a chance to run a FATE-based game last night using the Dresden Files rules.  Instead of going through the usual world-building session that would lead to an extensive campaign, we played a published one-off adventure so people could get the feel of the system.  I chose “Night Fears” as it seemed the simplest both in the low power level of the characters and the fairly simple scenario of kids showing up to a purportedly haunted house to spend the night.  Of course since there are Fae born characters and a ghost talking kid, the house IS haunted.  My goals were to help the players to learn what the Fudge dice were for, how to use skills (the easy parts), and how to use fatepoints to invoke, tag, and asses Aspects.  Also, since FATE has a pretty unique damage system, I wanted them to understand what Stress and consequences were.  I’m a newb myself, so these were also things that I understood in the abstract, but didn’t know how they actually played out.

The characters, pregenerated high school students included a Faeborn trickster, a religious kid whose faith actually gives him some supernatural power, a kid who can see the past (a bit) by focusing in on an inanimate object and a normal girl who is just real sensitive to her surroundings.  Nothing too powerful at all so there wasn’t going to be any running around with axes or gunplay.  What’s cool about this scenario is that these characters start off incomplete without all their skills and aspects chosen and this really gave the players a chance to start to understand what aspects are and how they are derived.  Night Fears has a section devoted to a series of questions to ask the group where the players themselves have a large hand in defining why exactly they are at the house and what they’re each doing there that night.  After a half hour or so, turning the answers to these questions in to aspects became a breeze, and a lot of fun too.  What the aspects actually DO was still a mystery at this point.

Because it was kids in a haunted house, I’d say 80% of the game play we got through was player on player interaction.  Since they were trying to scare each other out of the house, they started doing attacks (social or mental) on each other via ghost stories or trying to freak the others out with tricks.   This ended up causing consequences almost all around the table.  Of course, the house itself slowly starts to do these things to the kids as well (of course!).  Most of the characters took consequence aspects like ‘freaked out’ or ‘creeped out’ but one player took “huddled inside my sleeping bag” which forced him to walk around with his sleeping bag around him from that point on.

We didn’t get all that far, obviously the shit starts to go down the nearer it gets to midnight and I felt as a GM I wasn’t doing all that much (my NPC’s were not ‘active’ much during the session, but people had quite a bit of fun I think.

My main questions are:  When does some sort of argument become an attack– there was a fight over a flashlight (verbal) and in Exalted, you can actually ‘win’ the fight via social combat and get the flashlight, but in FATE, it seemed like the players would be just laying on consequences/stress that didn’t specifically resolve the argument over the flashlight.  Plus if you have social stress from the fight about the flashlight– should this carry over to a fight say– about going upstairs alone?

Environmental Aspects– these are aspects on the scene itself that can be invoked or tagged– but as a GM, if I invoke a scene aspect, who gets the Fate point?  Who pays it?  I’m still not totally clear on those bits.

All in all, a good time and not the usual Exalted 4-6 hour combat mega-bloodbaths I’m used to running (which are also good!).

SKYRIMMED!

The Dark elves look far better in Skyrim than oblivion, though that hat doesn't match too good.

It’s finally out!  Only a few hours in and it’s showing it’s quality in the combat, systems and graphics.  The metacritic score speaks for itself at ninety SIX.   While I liked Oblivion a lot, especially the Shivering Isles expansion (that just had excellent writing throughout) I felt Morrowind was the stronger game– though certainly not technically nor graphically– heck modders were able to make far better PC/NPC heads than Bethesda did back then, and by far better I really mean it,  so my hope with Skyrim is that it tops Morrowind by far.

Here is a tweak guide for PC users:  http://www.shacknews.com/chatty?id=27073178#item_27073178.  Big thing is to increase the Field of View if you are running in the FPS view (which is good for finding the small stuff).

My main love so far is that you can SWIM IN THE FUCKING CREEKS!  And I don’t mean just on the surface! Like Morrowind, you can go under the water and look around and, of course, find stuff.  Otherwise, like Fallout, for as big as the Skyrim world is, there is a shocking amount of detail to the environments– not RAGE level, which is wonderment incarnate, but close.

You still can’t make a pretty girlface via the custom creator.  In that this is no different than oblivion or fallout.  All the girls you can make for each race are fug ugs.

First Snow!

Yeah. Though it won’t stick to the ground, today is saying to all of us that the piss rain at 38 degrees horrible weather phase of the year is nearing it’s end and WINTER IS COMING. I picked up a black RED HI FI helmet because this year, at least once, I will go on a fun box and maybe off a small jump though here in Wisconsin with the hill’s (and I’m being very specific here saying HILL) proclivity for being covered by a little snow and a lot of ice, the latter may not happen. In any case, the shit season between mountain biking and snowboarding is almost over.

Post Funmatic Stress Disorder

I close my eyes and see Paris alleyways and cafes on fire with APV’s shattered in the middle of cobblestone streets with swarms of desert cammo’ed guys running around shooting AK-74M’s and throwing grenades, or goggled men in on their  belly in a long snake crawling behind a low wall as mortar fire rains down and people complain and complain.  Needless to say, a lot of battlefield 3 has been played by yours truly– about 12 hours of multiplayer so far, which is far less than many of the players, but quite a bit for me in less than a week.

The first days were just chaos, all the new maps and new players running into each other, having firefights with their own team mates, following people into dead ends or off the maps, crashing every type of vehicle off cliffs, into mountains either deliberately or accidentally but now, especially since the game came out in Europe, play is in earnest and has gotten much more focused and tactical without all the running around all over the place alone.

It’s a great game, and while I loved Battlefield Bad Company 2, BF3 is better, especially multiplayer.   Even playing alone and not listening to your squad at all, it’s a thinking man’s FPS, as the rushing in doesn’t work very well in most situations (some, yes), especially if you get spotted, and in the open, you will get spotted.  There are people that play that all they do is sit somewhere and spot people coming in for their teammates to clean up.  The difference when going into an engagement spotted compared to not is absolutely huge and, of course, most n00bs have no idea even how to do this.

I’m finally got 350 shotgun kills today.  After this I have no idea which weapon I’ll use– there are really too many guns and really all I want is my Baur from BF2142 (which I have heard is the G3A3 that can only be unlocked after (gulp) about ten hours of co-op match work).  For any new players, the gun stuff is very confusing– especially since when you use a gun you unlock the optics for it ONLY and have to start over with the next gun unlock.  For the Assault class, where every unlock is some random assault rifle, this can be pretty lame.  I guess because I didn’t play BF2 much, and the gun list was a lot smaller in BFBC2, I’m a bit lost (hence the shotgun only).    So as tired as the military shooter genre is, I have to give this game the highest possible rating.  My only complaint is the client side prediction–especially since I rarely get off more than two shots with the shotgun when near someone else– it can be frustrating to get the rubberband effect when you know you had a bead on someone.

Of the maps that are out– I like Caspian Border the best.  This was in the beta for a short time at the end, has a lot of open space and lots of wooded areas and is just a fluid, fun map with a lot of nervousness about the vehicles rolling around, though they are horribly vulnerable out in the open to the choppers.   The central three objectives (Woods, Hilltop and Gas Station) are just terrific to fight over as they are quite a bit like a Devil’s Den area of nastiness.  My least favorite is the Bazaar as it’s just too much about shooting down hallways with RPG’s for the entire map.  Meatgrinder maps can be fun, but the chokepoints on that map just get tiresome.

My shotgun build out, if anyone cares, is the 870MCS with the HOLO sight and Slugs.   This works at short range, but only does 91% damage without a head shot so you have to get two shots off for the kill, against someone with a submachine gun close up you are probably dead meat running and gunning.  However, compared to buckshot, which is better close up, I chose slugs because you can tag people at medium range and it still does a lot of damage– a head shot will kill outright.  So you can snipe with it (which is ridiculous but works) and you can shoot at people you are facing that are lying down and get a kill with one shot most of the time because there is the head right there.    One of the later unlocks, which you’d think would be better,  is the flak shell and this has not worked for me at all.  It seems to throw a lot of crap around but doesn’t get a lot of kills.  Flechette rounds– buckshot is better unless you are shooting through trees and stuff– not all that common.  Most of the sight unlocks are total trash for the shotgun– you don’t want a big ass scope getting in your way when you are shooting off the hip– and it’s too difficult to judge where your shots are going from a scope anyway (you don’t have any tracer shells to track).

Anyway, 6 more days until Elder Scrolls: Skyrim is out, which will likely put my BF3 playing on hold until early next year so I’m going to go get in on some good shooting.

Here are some insane videos just showing the breadth and depth of the chaotic madness that is BF3:

The Thing prequel review

I’m not a film guy but have to make a lengthy post about The Thing prequel as the ’82 version is one of my favorite films, so don’t try to stop me!  This has spoilers all over the place.  If you haven’t seen it and are going to the theatre, don’t read this.  If you are waiting for it on netflix, you won’t remember any of this anyway so read on.

The new film takes place days before the ’82 film, and deals with the Norwegian outpost’s run in with the Thing before it gets to the American base and fights Snake Pliskin.  In the new film, there are four American actors, Ramona Flowers as the lead, and three other dudes, (though the black guy has an African accent) with the rest of the cast being Norwegians with beards and one with a GIANT red beard.    The main questions if you’ve seen the old film a lot are:  How did they find the Thing in the first place?  How did they find the Thing’s ship?  What did they try to do to the Thing to get it all pissed off?  How did they mostly die?  How did two survive to chase the dog?  Why did the guy in the radio room kill himself? And the big one– if there is a mainline actress playing an American character in prequel that does NOT show up in the original film, what happens to her?  Outside of the story, the question needs to be answered: will the CGI Thing suck?

I can answer the last question right off the bat; the Thing itself looks incredible and you can barely tell it’s CGI at all except for a few parts.  What’s more, there was obviously some model building in a few scenes as the actors had to interact in ways with pieces of the Thing that could not be handled with CGI alone.  This was awesome.

The acting.  This film hinged on Ramona Flowers’ character.  I don’t even know her character’s name but just kept calling her Ramona or Winstead in later discussions after the film.  This could have been a very gritty, nasty foreign piece of work like Das Boot, all subtitled and just a Viking brawl against the shapeshifting Thing that tears people up– however, with the rather fragile, young, hot, female scientist as the lead protagonist, also being an American, they went in a different direction with the tone because you couldn’t rely on Snake Pliskin kicking ass in this one–she had to think her way out of most of her confrontations with both the revealed entity and hidden one.  It also doesn’t work to have her in violent conflict with the different factions of humans that grew suspicious of each other.  She takes violent actions when others do not because she knows what the Thing is more than they do and they look to her to help them not die.  If there was a comparable character from the old film, it would be Wilford Brimley’s guy (the scientist that went crazy and tore up all the radio room with an axe and later became the last surviving piece of the Thing that we know about).  The supporting cast of Vikings do a fine job and you feel affinity for some of them, especially Lars or “he who has the grenades” and are sad when they get destroyed by the Thing because you KNOW these guys are grist for the fucking mill right from the outset.  I was especially sad about the red beard guy as his beard alone should have been a pass for him to survive!  As I noted in an earlier post though, the film is essentially Ramona Flowers Vs the Thing as this conflict is central to the story.

So these Norwegians find the Thing in the ice, and the ship.  They bring Ramona Flowers to Antarctica as a some sort of scientist that knows how to thaw shit out of ice without damaging it, so that’s where she comes in along with some nebbish American research assistant and two pilots.    When they get the Thing back to base in a giant ice block, there is a decision made by the lead scientist to drill a hole into the ice and get a tissue sample, this is contradicted by Ramona Flowers, but she is rebuked.  Later the Thing wakes up and is real pissed.  This is notable because we, the audience, wanted to see direct correlation from the head scientist’s decision to drill into the fucker and it waking up pissed, but I did not get that from the film as I see the Thing as totally dormant before it started to thaw out, not being able to feel itself getting drilled into.  Taking quotes from the old film, Wilford Brimley states that “every part of it is a whole” but in the ice, it’s one big piece.  This begs the question whether the director intended for the pieces of the Thing to be able to communicate with itself when not connected.  I think the Carpenter film distinctly shows that it cannot.  I’m not sure if they were trying to convey that the drilling correlated directly to the initial attacks– but they could have.  Otherwise that drilling scene made no sense to have in the film except to establish the lead scientist as a douchelordian.

That said, there’s not much waiting for the bloodbath to start, and it’s good.  The thing is chitinous to start, but begins to look like people more as it absorbs them through the film.   The pacing is fast and there are too few great scenes where it’s creepy slow stuff, but one in particular dealing with Ramona finding some tooth fillings that is probably my favorite scene in the film.   If they had a couple more of these, I think it would have been a better film.  They build up the who’s who schtick, but the Thing appears and kills people so often that it’s tough for the paranoia and confusion to really grow.

When the fighting starts, it’s clear that the directors deviated from the original in that the Thing is extremely effective at weaponizing itself during combat (i.e: quickly).  In the old version, when they got the Thing exposed, it was fairly weak at fighting, and would obviously rather run away and hide than get burned up.  In the new film, the Thing is able to quickly create chitonous limbs that shoot out and kill people, tentacles that have barbs on the end and really rack up the body count NOT by having multiple human-Things attack at once, or getting people alone, but by straight up duking it out and hunting down the survivors.  This may be in contrast with the protagonist, who really is just a scientist girl with no combat experience who is fundamentally too hot for the audience to see die on screen.

What’s more, the Thing in this film is NOISY, it makes all these noises when stalking around or attacking, really making it easy for the humans to know where it’s at.  Again, you could chalk this up to the Thing’s first exposure to people, but really, if you are trying to get the humans alone so you can take them out one by one, why would you ever want to make any noise at all?  Maybe since this was the first exposure to people, it didn’t even know if people could hear, but that’s a stretch.

The Norwegians and Ramona seemed to figure stuff out fast, real fast, probably because the killing starts quick, and not all of it coming from the shadows– there are quite a few fights out in the open with the Thing, both adding to the body count and giving the CGI guys a chance to make some REAL crazy shit with the human bodies.  The flamethrowers come out real quick and again become the weapon of choice against the Thing.  In fact, they cover essentially the same progression of the original film in about half the time because the storyline moves off to other stuff*.  There’s some stuff in the dog kennel, everyone gathered in the rec room,  everyone standing around a big fire that’s burning the thing outside talking, people running in to put out the fire on a burning thing that (like the first film) are obviously pieces of it, a burning Thing breaking through a wall into the snow (this is in both of the previous films so they had to do it).  So, having only a few characters left and not near the end of the film, what could they do?

*The ship.  The Thing hauls ass back to it’s ship after getting pieces of itself burned up and the protagonists follow.  This was something I didn’t expect to happen and lead to the only scene that I really didn’t like too much.  We questioned after the movie why it didn’t just run away to the ship instantly and why it crawled out and froze in the first place if the ship worked.   The scene I wasn’t a fan of was one where Ramona is wandering around the ship and gets ambushed by the Thing.  Remember, per the previous film, the Thing gets you alone and then sneaks up on you and you are dead.  Well the Thing in this scene, aboard it’s own ship,  SUCKS at sneaking up.  There were no other distractions for it to worry about not to get Ramona Flowers once and for all, but she gets away.  Secondly, the directors had set up the Thing as highly effective at weaponizing itself rapidly– so even if it didn’t sneak up, it should have been able to take down a single human easily, even if that human was aware (whereas the ’82 film it clearly showed that exposed, the Thing was not a great fighter). Again, Ramona was able to get away.

I could go on, but this review has got to stop somewhere.  I like this film and want to watch it again. It was obviously made by huge fans of the original, which I am.  It didn’t seem to have the layers of the onion that the ”82 one did (with whether or not Childs was the Thing at the end, or who was the first one that got turned, etc.), but they have to wrestle with the fact that the audience KNOWS what the Thing is already.  The intrigue and deception of Thing’s copied people didn’t seem to work as well because the pace was so fast between exposure to the first full on attack and the major (in the rec room again) bloodletting of the cast.  All in all though, a worthy horror film with some great scenes and while part of me wanted that vicious, low budget subtitled Das Boot-style prequel, having Ramona Flowers in there was a good addition as a protagonist and added a lot to the film NOT having her be Kurt Russell’s Snake Pliskin.

 

It came from the wave 10/24

In addition to being the one week in the next month or so where the gaming industry hasn’t forced us to spend our hard earned cash, this weeks theme, if themeing of such randomness is even possible, would be “I MOUNT MY PLATYPUS!”

Apparently there’s going to be a micronauts film.  I don’t really think this is possible, but what the heck.

Some awesome color photos from the late 30’s and 40’s.  http://extras.denverpost.com/archive/captured.asp

Some dude despecialized the first Star Wars movie, i.e.: keeping as close to the original film while bringing it to HD quality.

I wouldn’t mind getting telefragged in this type of situation.

Close to the worst indy game I’ve ever played.

Beta stats for BF3.  Pretty amazing how many people played.  Makes you feel a bit like dust in the wind, except of course then you think again about the fact that you are a sentient being living out what is, compared to most other organisms in the biosphere, limited immortality,  in a universe that is largely filled with absolutely NOTHING — then you can feel like a unique little flower again like they taught you in the 70’s.

And then this, posted in it’s entirety:

At my old house I had this old man neighbor that would wait for me to rake my yard and then come out and use his air blower to blow the leaves from his yard into my yard. I was confused the first time I saw it happen so I didn’t think much of it. I thought to myself, “Oh he’s just an old retired boob and is sloppy with his leaf blower.” the first time it happened. But then when I went back out to rake up the leaves he had blown over I saw him in the fucking window watching and giggling.

When I went back out to rake my leaves later that month, I caught a glimpse of him in the window watching me rake the yard so I was aware that he was specifically waiting for me to be done. Sure enough, as soon as I went back in the house he came back out and did it again. I was fucking pissed. So I came back out and he wasn’t outside so I went and knocked on the door but there was no answer. The neighbor that lived on the other side of him saw me and noticed my hulk smash expression and came over and started chatting with me and said that he’d been living next door to the guy for 12 years and it has been happening the entire time he lived there. His retaliation, which I got to watch in action shortly after our conversation, was to buy a leaf blower of his own that was more powerful than his neighbor’s version, and blow all the leaves back into the guy’s yard and when the guy came out to blow them into other people’s yards again he would stand out there with his more powerful leaf blower and they’d have some super fucking silly old man leaf blowing duel shooting the shit back and forth at each other.

I didn’t have the money for the leaf blower, so I just took all of the leaves and raked them up and flipped them all over his bushes and shit so he couldn’t blow them out of there. I also started pissing all over his wife’s garden every night and killing all of the flower and sleeping soundly knowing that they were eating vegetables that had grown thanks to drinking my piss.

In the winter, the fucking guy would do the same thing with his snow blower. He’d wait for me to hand shovel the sidewalk and then blow the fucking snow from his section of sidewalk all over my front porch, walkway up to my house, and the sidewalk in front of the house. I hate shoveling, even more than raking, so I wanted to slaughter him but Midge thought that maybe if I did something nice for the guy and chatted with him he’d stop doing it. So I gave it a try and helped him out with fixing some shit in house, including his broken ass computer, and the thanks I got was he started plowing in my fucking garage door back in the alleyway. At that point I had to give him a quality sensless style shouting until he went in the garage and started brandishing some shovel or ax or something at me. This just made me even angrier so I started making a physical move towards him so he ran back in his garage and locked himself in there for awhile. After that, I started taking ALL of the dog shit from my back yard, which there was a huge amount of (two black labs worth) and threw it all over his fucking yard and continued to piss through the fence all over the areas that his wife’s gardens were

BF3 preload action

In anticipation of the 25th, pre-ordererererers can get the giant download of BF3 starting today (or once you get an email from EA) .  This in itself isn’t news at all, but I wanted to babble at some length about the excellent beta and other random stuff.

BF3’s beta was flat out the best I’ve ever been in.  It dispelled doubts about the Origin system being crap, let us play on one map a lot and another map for a few days both of which are absolutely worth playing over and over and over as even the small one without the vehicles is supergigantic, super intricate and most of all, fun as hell.  While there were bugs and issues, the long neck stuff, the dead-alive bug, crashing, not saving stats, and, of course, the servers being filled to the brim all the time, none of that really detracted from the hellacious amount of fun to be had running around, throwing grenades and just enjoying the carnival of carnage that BF3 has turned out to be.   With 154 shotgun kills (and the suffering that goes along with trying to get close enough to people to use a shotgun on them) I was just going berzerk.  EA is not a company I’m a huge fan of, so I went into the whole thing with a healthy skepticism born of being burned by their crappy steam-like client before (calling it steam-like is a bit of an insult to steam really) and the fact that it’s well know they want to eat into Valves electronic delivery mastery and BF3 is the engine that will lead them there.  However, after a good span of time  with BF2142, and a dabbling (as much as I had time for in the last year) with Battlefield Bad Company 2, I will buy every single Battlefield game made by DICE for the PC regardless of their publisher.  That’s just a cold hard fact of life.

Politically, we’re looking at a huge AAA+ title about ultra-recent warfare that again has the Russians vs Americans, which is getting sort of ridiculous at this point (about as ridiculous as the USA taking on a 5th rate economy in the cold war for 40 years instead of concentrating on hegemony and dominance of other areas of the globe that are now much more threatening to everyone else’s way of life).  However, if you look at the release trailer, Iran is in there as well and, of course, a good part of the game takes place in the middle east.  Doing something on the middle east during the absolute height of Arab Spring is a tough row to hoe and I’m a bit afraid of what the politics the single player will try to be.  We’re seeing the shitbags in power that the people of the arab world should have been burning in effigy for the last 30 years finally getting ousted or getting some bullets placed inside of them, and let’s face it, after the last year we can never look at Egypt, Libya and Tunisia the same again (and I hope we can say that about Syria and Iran soon) because everything has changed.  DICE obviously has been working on BF3 for years, and I can’t imagine the panic the writers may have been going through during the tyrant shake down that’s been happening.  Some of the factions they reference in the game may not even exist in the next few months.  Overall, this is a multiplayer game and no one is going to care if the political landscape is changed when they are blinding people with a tactical light attachment, base jumping off half-mile high cliffs or crashing helicopters into giant wind turbines.

D&D coloring book

greedy greedy hirelings

Monster Brains posted GIANT scans of the 1979 D&D coloring book here.   I had never seen this before as a kid and probably would have ignored it.  Who would spend 10$ on a coloring book when you could spend $12 on a new hardback monster manual 2 or Oriental Adventures (I never owned the latter)?   The art really quite good, but it’s not Tramp or anything like that.   If you have kids, these are easily large enough to print out on 8 1/2 X 11 and set them to coloring like the slavemaster you are.

While never into the whole Old School revival (of D&D at least), this is a gem.