Filed under: Organized Event, Real Life Adventures | Tags: 4th edition, Deadweight, gaming, Geovanna
It happens to all of us at some stage. We enter a story in the middle with no idea what’s going on or why this person is treating the other so badly. Perhaps your friends have all been watching a new show, and you catch an episode with them. It doesn’t take long to realise how much you’ve missed, so you ask somebody beside you what’s going on.
Due to timing restrictions we didn’t have as many players today as I had hoped, but we still played. This is a summary or what’s happened.
The Boetian Empire has been slowly oppressing its soveriegn states whilst exhaulting the status of its own citizens. The people of Belgae have managed to send a representative, Geovanna, to Baron Garfield Spiggot, an influential man who may be able to help them confront the Empire about its latest edicts.
The two were attacked by an ork on the way to Trouse, the hometown of Spiggot. The ork proved to be much mightier than they had anticipated.
They arrived in town shortly before it was attacked by a group of bandits. The townsfolk grouped together in the center of town, in a pallisaded area apparently made for just such an occasion. As the bandits looted the town Deadweight the warlord, in an impressive display of leadership qualities, survayed the local brew, Spiggot Ale, and tried to stay unnoticed. Geovanna went to find out more.
A guard told her that these attacks are not an uncommon thing, but that Baron Spiggot always protects them. While Geovanna watched, and Deadweight vigorously engaged in innaction, the Baron himself rode into town, blowing a trumpet at the edge of town, visiting the pallisade, then chasing the bandits out of town. What a hero!
He joined the townsfolk for a round of Spiggots Ale and spoke with the two newcommers. They were invited to spend the night in his mansion, but to wait a couple of hours before coming to allow time to ‘prepare.’
Geovanna and Deadweight visited the local courrier, which has been hit several times by the bandits – even to the point of losing several imperial messages…
Spug, the Chief Courrier, gave them a little information and hinted that there could be great rewards if they could find the bandits base, and return what was taken. Deadweight mistreated a young boy. The two went to the Baron’s mansion to spend the night.
other things you missed:
- Deadweight abusing an orphan
- Geovanna’s jugs
- Deadweight leaving Geovanna with the bill for his ale
- Some amazingly low rolls against a super-resourceful ork (able to jump small chairs…)
With a little luck the 1st edition campaign will start soon aswell. The story has been re-written and is entirely compatible with the present campaign.
Filed under: games | Tags: 4th, D&D, gaming, Sheriff Frogtooth and the Foxtold murders, tf2
I’ve been pretty disconnected from the rest of the CGH group lately, and with no reason other than the bewitching rasta of a busy life. During that time though, I have had time to explore a few things.
I have been driven to play TF2 to a great degree. The sheer variety of the classes, and the fact that all of them are useful, is a feat of design that I have not seen matched. Not even in those MMORPGs that some people get hooked on.
Valve have taken a page from microsoft and a lot of school teachers, by starting to use achievements. To this day I can still hand kids at school a sticker for completing a task, and they are happy. That’s all the motivation they need. Similarly, the average xbox gamer needs only the carrot flavoured achievement, the little ‘ding’ that sounds, letting them know they’ve completed some arbitrary task. As an experiment in psychology, it’s fantastic. Now it’s in Valve games too. Somehow, providing a heap of achievements for medic players is all that was needed to bring them back into prominence.
For some time I played an engineer, hunting for the 10 sentry kills achievement. I have yet to get that one. The medic achievements come hard and fast – but unless you have a good partner you’re somewhat ineffective. Few and far between are the medics that can help more than one player. In a social group the medic is the guy who isn’t so cool, but spends a lot of time with the most cool person. When the cool person isn’t there, they find that they have no social responses for most things. When the cool person is there, they can make snide remarks about those outside their cliche knowing they have the safety of Mr Cool to back them up. That’s how medics work.
4th Edition
If I need to say what it’s the 4th edition of, then you wont be interested in this paragraph. I’m eager to play it, but there are features I immediatly dislike. I don’t like the ‘class roles’ they’ve gone for. That’s nothing but a combat oriented approach to gaming, and doesn’t encourage people to take different groups into gaming.
There’s no place for non-combat characters either. How do you run a local sheriff trying to solve a series of murders in his small town? You don’t. not. in. 4th. You take a party with exactly one Striker, one Controller etc and hack the badies apart.
There are things I like about it too, but I’ll talk about them more after my campaign has started and I have a chance to playtest everything.
Filed under: Real Life Adventures | Tags: bowling, dow, gaming, soulstorm, tf2, WoW
Well my gaming this weekend crossed into the realm of real life. I had my first ever bowling experience. It was interesting going from wii-bowling to the real thing. I have to say my score suffered, but not as much as I had first anticipated.
I discovered one thing though. Bowling is fun.
Aside from that it’s only a few days until the new internet is here and ready for TF2 action. A lot of people are waiting for this. With a little luck 007dawg will have his new internet soon and we’ll be able to challenge the dark powers that control Soulstorm. Maybe it will work this time. Maybe. Regardless, we’ve both hit 40, and have our mounts for wow. I think things are looking good. I have a feeling though, that by the time some of our other casual buddies get into the game they’ll have to use their mains just to keep up with us.
Filed under: Organized Event, games | Tags: dow, gaming, NDS, rob is great, Rondo of Swords
Well lately my posts have been spread pretty thin, like the last scraping of butter from the tub. Just like that very same butter, it’s very hard for this post to cover everything I’ve got to mention, so I’ll be brief.
Firstly, Rondo of Swords for the Nintendo DS. It’s a neat little strategy / rpg-ish game. Set in your standard fantasy world with fairly standard characters (actually, they’re far more cliche than that, but it’s ok because of the pure class). I’d say there are probably two things that come to mind about this game. Firstly is one of the characters will hit on every single girl he comes across in the game. That’s what really endeared me to the game to be honest.
Surrounded by enemies, your own life bar reduced to a sliver like the progress bar of your computer trying to defrag itself and scan for viruses at the same time, this guy still has time to pull one liners in the most casual way. Pure bond. Unfortunately the responses he gets aren’t usually so positive…
The other thing is that this game dares to be unintuitive in a time, and on a platform where being intuitive and ‘casual friendly’ is the same as being available in stores. There isn’t a particularly steep learning curve, and the tutorials will have you rolling pretty quickly… but if you try to move up to an enemy and THEN attack him… well too bad for you.
Ok, now that’s out of the way… My experience with the Microsoft support line in Japan. WOW. This it worth a post all of its own. Infact I might save most of it for its own post when the deal is finally done. For the time being I’ll tell you about the call I tried to make. This was AFTER Rika had called and failed to get help. She’s a native Japanese speaker, I’m not. I can speak a bit and understand a lot more, but for things like getting support I generally found people will go out of their way a bit more if they can’t just give you the company lines.
I called and was given a set of ‘push this button to continue’ style menus. I bungled through the first THREE, then gave up and kept pressing 0 until it started dialing for a human. I said “Excuse me, I need help with my xbox 360, my Japanese is very poor, can you help me?”
He went on to tell me in the bluntest of Japanese that ‘this is Japan’ and if I was going to speak English, then he wasn’t going to be able to help me. In Japanese it’s very easy to tell when somebody’s being polite or not. *sigh*
Ok, finally games are on for this weekend. Can I shotgun Sunday afternoon?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: gaming, portal, reviews, rob is great, steam, you have to burn the rope
I played two games today. Through an exercise of extraordinary gaming prowess I also finished both of them in enough time to do a quick review of each. So here are my thoughts on ‘You have to burn the rope,’ and ‘Portal.’
This is a classic game from the top game studio mazapan.se. The mechanics of the game are fairly intuitive – the title screen, for example is fairly self-explanatory:
…and it doesn’t get much more complicated after that. You’ll find that once you load the game, most keys are bound to either ‘jump’ or ‘throw axe.’ The movement keys work in a similar way to the smash bros system with up being ‘jump.’
One of the more challenging elements of the game is the end boss, the Grinning Colossus:
This boss is impervious to your weapons and grins evilly knowing exactly how weak your are against it, and exactly how big it is. It is indeed big. One might even say gargantuan, titanic or mcdonalds. Fortunately there is a way to get through its near-invincible veneer of amicability.
I’ll leave finding the answer up to you, but just to show that it can be done, here’s my killshot:
The other game I played was the ever-famous PORTAL.
This game has been reviewed to death with many a cake joke, and many a reference to Jonathan Coulton’s song “still alive.” It has received near perfect praise from any reviewer who came off their drug high long enough to sit down for 5 minutes and write a few words. Even the notorious Yahtzee gave it a big thumbs up.
It’s not difficult to see why. The learning curve is forgiving, introducing you slowly to the new game mechanics, as a sadist might slowly lower a lobster into a boiling pot. There are two things, I suppose that really stand out in this game. Firstly there is a nice sardonic sense of humour at work throughout the game. In general this comes through the ever-present voice-overs, although there are other touches, such as warning signs or impressively designed cubes that draw you into the darkly humourous world of portal.
The other sticking point of the game is that I have never come across game mechanics like this before. Certainly there have been games that allowed teleportation of one sort or another. There have been plenty of problem solving games too, but none really meshed so perfectly, or relied on one another so profusely as this does.
All in all I’d say both games are worth playing. The price is only one afternoon of effort, which for me at least, is a very reasonable effort.
Filed under: Game Reviews, games | Tags: dow, gaming, rob is great, soulstorm, wh40k
The dark eldar have finally been unleashed onto the land of Kansai. So far I’ve noticed the same things that everybody seems to be talking about – conquering planets is the same as conquering countries; and flying is essentially the same as not flying.
Regardless, this game comes from good heritage, and that alone is enough to make it a game worth playing. To be honest though, I’m still finding my feet with the new races. To be honest, apart from the sex appeal, the Sisters of Battle have nothing for me. Sturdy, sure, but…. slow and boring.
The Dark Eldar on the other hand have a certain… allure. Having said that though, I’m yet to really get a feel for them. Playing a couple of skirmishes it didn’t really feel like my tactical decisions or different troop types made much of a difference. The exception being Raiders. Those are damn handy bastards.
I’ll keep playing though and try to give a more educated opinion later when I’ve become more educated in the opinion area.
