Random bits o' game
It should be no surprise that after my grumpy post about games, I found some games that I really love. This also happened to coincide with Steam's big sale. Funny how that happens.... I got to try some things that I didn't think I'd like much, but it turns out I really enjoy it. I'll touch on a few games...
I also picked up Don't Starve, Hotline Miami, The Swapper, and Spelunky.
After writing my previous post, I also played an awesome board game that I completely fell in love with called Clash of Cultures. It's the Civilization-like board game I've been wanting for years. It's not surprising that it comes from the guy behind one of my other favorite board games, Merchants & Marauders, because that one is basically Sid Meier's Pirates: The Board Game. Clash of Cultures is Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game, only it does it better than the actual Civilization board game. It's the first board game to really get a tech tree right, striking that balance of strategic choices without making things too complex. There's a lot you can do in the game, but it's all very manageable - just like Merchants & Marauders.
Not this coming Thursday but the next, I will be heading down to Augusta for my second Seige of Augusta. While I just went for one day last year, this year I will be there for the whole thing, rooming with Mark for a entire weekend of non-stop gaming. On Friday, I will be running the Dust Warfare tournament. I'm pretty anxious about this since I've never done anything like this before, but I absolutely adore the game and want to get people aware of it, especially now that the new starter boxes are being released so it's a great time to jump in. There probably won't be many people for that tournament, but I hope for at least a modest turn out. On Satruday I will probably be participating in the Warmachine tournament, but other than that, I don't have any plans. I'll probably end up playing a bunch of Dust and Dropzone Commander with Dustin, which should be fun.
I've been running a Legend of the Five Rings RPG on Mondays, and that's been going really well. The group has finished two scenarios, and I'm about to start them on what is certainly the most ambitious RPG campaign I've ever done. I want to move away from isolated events and get into longer, more drawn out stories... lots of recurring characters, overarching plots that span several scenarios, that kind of thing. We'll see if I'll be able to pull it off. The biweekly family RPG group wants to do A Song of Ice and Fire RPG. We went through their house creation process last time and now they are about to do character creation. I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to do with this. Creating stories in the ASoIaF world scares the shit out of me. Luckily only a few have seen the show and only Lee has read any of the books, so there's not really a high expectation other than a "we've heard the show it good" kind of thing. I think emergent story and the players really taking initiative on things they want to do in a kind of sandbox world would be the best way to play this game, but I can't see this group doing that. Most of them aren't experienced in that kind of role play and I don't know how to introduce them to it. They are all used to "here's a mission, go do it" kind of play while this game promotes "here's a scenario, go do what you want" or even "go create your own situation" kind of play.
- Starbound - If I hadn't spent to fucking much time in Terraria, I'd probably all over this game.
- Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII - I went ahead and bought these two, mainly to support Final Fantasy on the PC and with the hope that one day Final Fantasy IX will appear on Steam. I want this mainly because I'd like RC to play FFIX one of these days. It's easily the "best" of the PSX era FF, and it in my opinion the last "great" Final Fantasy (though VX is looking pretty fucking badass). IX belongs up there alongside other classic Square RPGS like SMRPG, FFVI and Chrono Trigger. I have been playing FFVIII bit by bit while I listen to stuff. I'm taking the super slow route, building up my card and magic collection early to really twink out characters once I get them and then breeze through the rest of the game. The story of VIII is pretty fucking dumb, but the mechanics in it are pretty awesome once you realize how totally broken you can make the game, and that's the enjoyment I get out of VIII. That and it's pretty. I think the graphics still hold up today. When Zach saw it, he couldn't believe it was an original PlayStation game. That made me laugh.
- Skulls of the Shogun - Given to me by a dear friend, this is a game I had my eye on for a while, but for the longest time I couldn't play it because I didn't have a Windows phone or Windows 8. I had followed its development and loved when one of the lead developers was on the 8-4 Play podcast talking about the design philosophies behind it. I really, really, really like it. I've played several gridless tactics games, but this is the first one that I think has really done it right.
- Endless Space - I played the beta version and liked it, and I'm pleased to see a lot of the problems I had have been pretty much completely dealt with. It's a fantastic space 4x game. The only real problem I have with it is the tech tree. It doesn't convey information as well as I'd like. There are plenty of situations where I say "ok, I want to do 'this' and I know it can be done, now where it the tech that will let me do it?" It's not as intuitive as a Civilization tech tree because there's not really any real-world analogies. But that problem can be remedied with a few plays and simply getting more familiar with the tree.
- Shadowrun Returns - This and the next game would be contenders for my favorite game of 2013. I used to play the Shadowrun tabletop RPG back in high school. It was Dungeons & Dragons fantasy spliced with late 80's / early 90's cyberpunk, so of course I ate it up. I never played the SNES Shadowrun game, but I knew it was beloved. Playing 'Returns' has made me fall in love with Shadowrun all over again and now I've been eyeing the leather bound special edition book for the new version of the RPG. The core game play of returns is tactical combat that was clearly directly inspired by the recent X-Com reboot, only with magic and cybernetics along with guns and grenades. The story is pretty great, too, and I think that's really why Shadowrun Returns captured me more than X-Com did.
- Valdis Story: Abyssal City - Hey, RC, you should play this game! This game came out of nowhere for me. I saw it on sale, clicked on to its store page. Read the first sentence, which said "assume the role of Wyatt in this Action/Exploration Platformer," and instantly clicked buy. There's more to the sentence, and there's a whole paragraph that comes after, but I didn't bother reading it. The graphics are gorgeous, the game play is awesome, I really cannot recommend this more to metroidvania fans. This is what I was hoping to get out of Dust: And Elysian Tail.
I also picked up Don't Starve, Hotline Miami, The Swapper, and Spelunky.
After writing my previous post, I also played an awesome board game that I completely fell in love with called Clash of Cultures. It's the Civilization-like board game I've been wanting for years. It's not surprising that it comes from the guy behind one of my other favorite board games, Merchants & Marauders, because that one is basically Sid Meier's Pirates: The Board Game. Clash of Cultures is Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game, only it does it better than the actual Civilization board game. It's the first board game to really get a tech tree right, striking that balance of strategic choices without making things too complex. There's a lot you can do in the game, but it's all very manageable - just like Merchants & Marauders.
Not this coming Thursday but the next, I will be heading down to Augusta for my second Seige of Augusta. While I just went for one day last year, this year I will be there for the whole thing, rooming with Mark for a entire weekend of non-stop gaming. On Friday, I will be running the Dust Warfare tournament. I'm pretty anxious about this since I've never done anything like this before, but I absolutely adore the game and want to get people aware of it, especially now that the new starter boxes are being released so it's a great time to jump in. There probably won't be many people for that tournament, but I hope for at least a modest turn out. On Satruday I will probably be participating in the Warmachine tournament, but other than that, I don't have any plans. I'll probably end up playing a bunch of Dust and Dropzone Commander with Dustin, which should be fun.
I've been running a Legend of the Five Rings RPG on Mondays, and that's been going really well. The group has finished two scenarios, and I'm about to start them on what is certainly the most ambitious RPG campaign I've ever done. I want to move away from isolated events and get into longer, more drawn out stories... lots of recurring characters, overarching plots that span several scenarios, that kind of thing. We'll see if I'll be able to pull it off. The biweekly family RPG group wants to do A Song of Ice and Fire RPG. We went through their house creation process last time and now they are about to do character creation. I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to do with this. Creating stories in the ASoIaF world scares the shit out of me. Luckily only a few have seen the show and only Lee has read any of the books, so there's not really a high expectation other than a "we've heard the show it good" kind of thing. I think emergent story and the players really taking initiative on things they want to do in a kind of sandbox world would be the best way to play this game, but I can't see this group doing that. Most of them aren't experienced in that kind of role play and I don't know how to introduce them to it. They are all used to "here's a mission, go do it" kind of play while this game promotes "here's a scenario, go do what you want" or even "go create your own situation" kind of play.