My History With Board Games - Part 2

Hello, hello!  Y'know, I feel like I spend a lot of time apologizing for not being around, but hey, sorry I haven't been around.  I was having some home-life issues this past weekend, but everybody's okay and it's all good now, for the most part.  All told I actually had a pretty great weekend, there was just a sizable amount of stressful stuff going on in the background.

But that's not why we're here today!  We're here to talk about tabletop gaming, specifically to continue my retrospective of how I've interacted with board games and card games, etc..  Last time we talked about my childhood and adolescence, with special focus on the trading card games of my youth.  Today we'll be talking about my adult life so far and how much I've gotten into the hobby since moving to Canada.

Actually, that's an important part of the story that's worth talking about for a second.  See, when I first moved to Canada to marry my wife, there was a long period of time where it was literally illegal for me to have a job.  My wife, of course, took care of me and still does, but we also had to live with her family, that being her parents and her three sisters (she has four but one lives in America).

What we had originally planned to be a relatively short amount of time turned into almost five years.  There was a lot of stress, and not a few fights.  I'm not always the easiest person to live with.  But none of that could ever outweigh how great it was of them to take me on and put up with me for such a long period of time.  They took me into their home and into their family and treated me like one of their own, and I'll always be grateful to them for that.

My wife and her sisters have a long history of doing things together, whether it be playing games (video or otherwise), going out, or just generally having fun.  Obviously, then, new multiplayer games were pretty much always a good thing.  As it happens, just a few months into my living with them, I learned about Arkham Horror.

Image borrowed from Yog-Sothoth.com

Arkham Horror, originally created in 1987, is heavily inspired and influenced by the works of H.P. Lovecraft (The Call of Cthulhu, et al).  It's a cooperative board game in which the players each take on the role of a character in the city of Arkham, Massachusetts, in the 1930s.  The players work together to fight off monsters, cultists, and all manner of maddening horror, with the ultimate goal being to stop the awakening of an extremely powerful Ancient One or, having failed that, hopefully destroy it.

After doing my usual amount of research into the game, at that point deep into its second edition, I ultimately decided it could be fun for my wife, her sisters, and I, and I bought it as soon as I tracked it down.  It's a somewhat complicated game to learn, and people's schedules are equally as complicated, so it took a couple weeks before any of us could really sit down and play it, but when we finally did, it was like a switch being flipped.

I'm not going to pretend to perfectly remember the first time we played, but I do know that we had a great time.  I was playing, of course, as was my wife Jessie, and my sisters-in-law Emily and Hannah.  Now, keep in mind that Arkham Horror is heavily, heavily influenced by the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, which my wife and I had both known about and were interested in, but had never really tried to get into.  Hannah, at that time, was interested in just about anything, but Emily, as far as I know, had no interest in Lovecraft, and isn't much of a horror person, so I wasn't sure how she would respond to it.  Well, it's possible she loved it the most out of all of us, which is really saying something.

That became the normal group for a long while, the four of us playing Arkham Horror together when there was time, which wasn't extremely often since it's a pretty long game.  So many great stories came out of that time, but the one that sticks out to me the most was the time the character Jenny, whom Hannah was playing in that particular game, saved the world from evil by closing a portal to another dimension - with herself on the other side.  That was an emotional moment.

Requiescat en pace, Jenny Barnes.
Image borrowed from the Mansions of Madness wiki

It's amazing to think how much of an effect Arkham Horror had on my hobbies in the intervening years.  My wife and I are both now huge fans of the Lovecraftian horror mythos, and by relation other things inspired by it.  If I hadn't already loved Guillermo del Toro and Mike Mignola before, I certainly would now.  I'll talk in more detail about how I feel about this particular branch of the horror genre some other time, but I wanted to make sure it was known that, while I've always been interested, I may not  be anywhere near as into it without Arkham Horror.  And Bloodborne.

Beyond that, it's also the game that started my foray into tabletop games as a hobby and led directly into part 3 of this series, which I sincerely hope will be up tomorrow.  I'll finally get to talk about what has become my absolute favorite tabletop game, the final expansion of which I finally received recently.  I'm very, very excited, even though it might mean the end of all reality!

Before I go, I just want to reiterate that Arkham Horror is a fantastic board game.  I haven't played it since Emily moved out, and now Jessie and I have our own place as well, so things are even more complicated.  The game takes so long to set up and play, and we get together so rarely that it's difficult to put the time into it.  With all that considered, I'm really not sure if I'll ever play that edition of the game again.

But that's okay!  I'll always have my memories, and there are new things on the horizon!  See, a lot has happened in the tabletop gaming landscape in the years since Arkham Horror second edition was released. Fantasy Flight, the company that publishes the game, has also released another game called Eldritch Horror, similar to Arkham Horror in concept but more streamlined and with a more globe-trotting approach rather than a single town.  I've heard it's very good, but the global span of it seems a bit too big picture compared to Arkham's more intimate setting, so I've been hesitant to invest in it.

Closer to home has been the release of Arkham Horror: The Card Game, which again is a faster and more streamlined take on the original Arkham Horror.  It's still cooperative, but pared down to a maximum of two players (though two copies of the game can be merged to allow a maximum of four players).  Again, I've heard really good things about it, and I hope to be getting a copy of it soon enough.  I'm actually quite looking forward to it.

And now it's all come full circle, since before long we'll be seeing the release of Arkham Horror Third Edition.  It seems to bring back the characters and locations of the original (rather, the one I played), but with (again) faster and more streamlined play, and boasting a modular board that changes depending on the scenario being played.  That style of board is a great idea, but I feel like it loses a bit of its aesthetic appeal when compared to the town map of the second edition.  Still, I'm excited to see how things go with it.

With all that stuff going on, it seems even more likely that I won't play my second edition copy again, at least not more than once or twice.  It's a sad thought, but with all these new, faster ways to play, maybe we can finally get the old group back together and save the town of Arkham from evil together, just like the old days.

Until next time!

Current Interests:
Listening - No Joke! (Meat Puppets, 1995)
Playing - World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth
Reading - Island 731 (Jeremy Robinson, 2013)
Watching - Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return (2017)

The Tragedy of Magi-Nation

Hello hello!  I meant to have another post up last week, but time kind of got away from me.  I don't mean to make excuses, but I've got everything on a new schedule now and I'm still getting used to it, so I guess there will be some slip-ups here and there.

Now, I had originally planned for today's post to be a sequel to last week's post, detailing more of my recent history with tabletop games, but I decided to push that to later this week.

Instead, I decided to slide this article in today as a sort of interlude or segue from that last post to the next one.  I'm going to be talking about my favorite trading card game of all time: Magi-Nation Duel.

All images in this article courtesy of Blue Furok

There was a period of time in the early 2000s that I was absolutely enamored with Magi-Nation Duel.  It's the first property for which I can ever remember writing (or at least developing) my own fanfiction.  It's also, unfortunately, the first thing I can ever remember loving and losing.  Magi-Nation died way too soon and, unlike most things, I was still a fan when it went away.  But before I get into all of that, let me tell you a bit about it.

Sorry, Tony.

Magi-Nation Duel was a somewhat story-driven trading card game originally released in October of 2000.  The story involved a world known as the Moonlands, so named because the world was actually the moon of a larger planet.  The Moonlands are divided into a dozen or so regions, each one themed after a particular natural biome (swamplands, forests, mountains), some more fantastical than others.  The important characters residing here are known as Magi, people possessed with the ability to use magic, as well as summon and control monsters known as Dream Creatures.  For the life of me I can't remember if everyone is a Magi, or if that's just the only characters we see and there are mundane folks too, but I guess it's neither here nor there.  Oh, also sometimes people from Earth (that is to say, the real world?) find themselves pulled into the Moonlands and are then stuck there.  Woops.

Two players would go head-to-head, each playing a team of Magi and using a deck of cards built to (hopefully) maximize the strength of their selected Magi.  Players would take turns summoning Dream Creatures, casting spells, and just generally trying to take down their opponent.  As one Magi runs out of health, the controlling player removes them from the game and switches in their next Magi, and play continues until someone has lost all three of their Magi.  The player left standing is the winner.

Now, aside from some minor differences here and there, you might think that sounds a bit like Magic: the Gathering, the original, evergreen TCG that's still going strong to this day.  Well, that's because it was a lot like Magic, except for one very big detail: Magi-Nation was better.

Now before someone decides to burn something down due to that statement, first understand that I love Magic.  Admittedly, I don't really play it anymore, but that's mainly because I don't play TCGs (or any randomly-collected games) anymore.  I can be really bad about wanting to collect absolutely everything there is to collect when it comes to things I like, but I just can't afford that with a TCG.  Even if Magi-Nation still existed, I probably wouldn't be playing it anymore due to that fact alone.

So make no mistake, Magic has always been and continues to be a great game.  I was raised on it, and I can vividly remember when I was finally old enough to understand how to play.  I still own my old Magic cards, and I'll one day inherit my dad's collection.  Just last week I was ecstatic because I found my set of the five Basic decks from 2009.  I hadn't seen them since I moved a couple years ago, and I was worried they were lost.  And if there are decks to play, I will play.  I really like Magic.

So let it be understood that I do not proclaim anything to be "better" than Magic on a whim.  And I don't mean to imply that Magi-Nation was somehow perfect, since it clearly wasn't or it might still be around, and I think it's obvious that it never could have existed without Magic existing first.  But the simple fact of the matter is that Magi-Nation was, in my opinion, just a stronger game, mechanically speaking.

There are a few specific things that I could point to as things I like better about Magi-Nation, not the least of which being the Magi themselves.  See, each Magi was an actual character in the lore of the game, and each came with their own set of strengths and weaknesses.  Each Magi had their own specific amount of health/energy (we'll come back to that), as well as their own abilities and, best of all, a list of cards they start with in addition to their randomly-drawn hand.  Having an actual character (or set of characters) to represent you in the game, giving you special things you can do that the opponent can't, goes that extra step towards making you feel like you're actually playing a story rather than just laying cards down.  But maybe that's just me.

Speaking of the story, I didn't know all that much about it, ironically, mostly because I didn't keep up with (and later couldn't find) the original fiction the creators of the game would release on the official website.  But that didn't stop me from loving the setting, which I did and still do.  Like I said, this is the first franchise I can ever remember creating my own fanfiction for.  I had a favorite character, Gar, and since I didn't really know much about the actual story, Gar became the main character.  It was actually a really good writing exercise, since I would base the events of the story around what cards existed, and how later cards would change the feeling of certain things.  All of these things came to me more or less without context, and so I gave them context.  I can still remember a lot of the details to that story I came up with and never wrote down sixteen years ago so it just goes to show how important it was to me.

In fact, so fascinated was I with the whole setup of each region being themed around a particular element (also present in Bionicle, released the same year, which I'm sure I'll talk about at some point) that I still want to find a way to use it in a story or something nowadays.  I am unhappy with how rarely I see it.

Now, all of that is really just window dressing and flavor, and doesn't necessarily add up to a better game.  But that's okay, because now I come to my absolute favorite aspect of the game itself: the energy system.

For the benefit of the uninitiated, I'll just quickly explain about how you play cards in Magic.  See, the most important kind of card in Magic is what's known as Land.  There are five major types of Land cards, each connected to one of the five colors of mana in the game (blue islands, black swamps, etc.).  Land costs nothing to put into play (usually), and can then be used every turn as energy to cast spells or summon monsters.

So this is a fine system, and it's undoubtedly a classic, but I've always felt like it made the game just a bit too reliant on luck.  It seems like it happens far too often that an otherwise skilled player can be brought down by too little (or too much) land in hand.  There are ways around this, but they're iffy and still usually rely on luck.  To be fair, I haven't played with any new Magic cards in a very long time, so maybe this isn't such a problem anymore, but I highly doubt that.

My point is that Magi-Nation avoided the problem altogether by way of its energy system.  Each Magi begins the game with a certain amount of energy points.  This energy serves basically the same purpose as mana in Magic, but it also serves as the character's health pool.  To spend energy is to spend health, and to lose health is to lose energy.  It is absolutely possible that you could kill yourself by overspending your energy, but it's not quite as dangerous as you might think.  That's because every turn, during the "energize phase", your Magi regains a set amount of energy.

This system is, in my very humble opinion, so much more elegant and refined than the mana system in Magic that it's a little bit ridiculous.  Don't get me wrong, I'm fully aware that this is no longer unique, since there have been plenty of Magic-type games that have come up with various ways of avoiding the issues that come with mana.  One of the main ones I think of is Duel Masters, a game from a few years after Magi-Nation, which was set up so that any card could be used either for its intended effects (like summoning a monster) or as energy instead.  Hell, Hearthstone has a set amount of energy build up over the course of the game.  But keep in mind that Magi-Nation came out in 2000.  That's years before World of Warcraft came out, much less Hearthstone.

Again, I don't mean to belittle or insult any of these games, I only mean to bring across just how great this Magi-Nation was, and how much it deserved more time than it got.  After it petered out in 2002, there were a few attempts and there to bring it back, but these never got very far outside of a cartoon series a full five years later.  I've never seen the cartoon itself, but what I have seen of it leads me to believe that it failed to capture the spirit of the world.  But I'm not here to tear down things I haven't actually seen, so I don't have much to say about it.

I know that at least some of my feelings about this game are nostalgia, personal bias, or both.  But that doesn't change the fact that this property had real potential, which ultimately went untapped.  The fact that a website, the stalwart Blue Furok, still exists out there with a gallery of every card printed (and some not printed) goes at least a little way towards proving that I'm not the only one that loved it.

I've gone on record as saying that if I ever become one of those people with tons and tons of money, I will buy the rights to Magi-Nation and see to it that it gets re-released in some form or fashion.  I stand by that, but it's not the most likely thing in the world.  Hell, I'd be happy with a new Netflix animated series that more accurately captures the feeling of the world.  And I'd be ecstatic if, in some sort of dream scenario for me, Greater Than Games acquired the rights and started releasing the game again, with Adam Rebottaro doing the artwork.  And if you're unfamiliar with those names, hang around and you won't be for much longer.

Honestly though, I know that none of those things are likely, or even probable, and I've come to accept that.  Still, Magi-Nation is something that will always be with me, rattling around somewhere inside my brain.  I've still got my fanfiction in my head, I've got my own personal downloads of all the cards just in case Blue Furok ever goes down, and I even have ways to play the game now, albeit by proxy, so it's not all bad.

But if anyone out there is a millionaire and wants to #bringback Magi-Nation, just do me one favor: make Gar the main character.  He uses fire to heal people!

Until next time!

Current interests:
Listening - Lofi hip hop radio
Playing - Sentinels of the Multiverse (2011)
Reading - Island 731 (Jeremy Robinson, 2013)
Watching - Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return (2017)

My History With Board Games - Part 1

Greetings, intrepid readers!  I took off Labor Day week since my wife had a bunch of vacation time, and a few exciting things happened around here, but I'm back now and ready to talk.  So let's get talking!

So there's been a lot going on around here as of late, and a not-small percentage of the activity has been related to one of my favorite hobbies: board games.  And card games.  Really any tabletop gaming whatsoever.  I use the term "board game" as a catch-all in place of "tabletop games," just because I prefer how it sounds.  So, with all that in mind, and with not much else going on until October, September is going to be an unofficial "Board Game Month," of sorts.  That's right, it's so unofficial it gets written in title case.  Also, this "month" is starting ten days late, so...

I have a lot to say on the subject, and I'm hoping to get out at least two posts a week before the first Blogtober post on September 30th, so expect to be hearing a lot out of me.  I'll be talking about some of my favorite games, detailing the various ways I interact with the hobby, and just generally nerding out about it.  Today, though, to get us started, I'm going to be talking about my history with board games and how they've affected my life up to now.  So without further ado, away we go!

Okay, so as a kid, I loved board games.  I have very distinct memories of being roughly five years old and owning a Goosebumps Horrorland board game.  I don't remember anything about it (though I'm sure I'd recognize it), but I definitely remember that I had it.  I'm almost afraid to look it up out of fear that it doesn't exist.

Pictured: Proof of Existence
Image courtesy of the Goosebumps Wiki

I can also vividly remember my grandmother, who worked at Belk, asking me if I wanted her to buy me anything from there, and all I said was "A board game?", not realizing she meant clothing.  Because they sell clothing.  (Also, for the record, I originally typed Belk as Belk's because you can take the boy out of the South, et. cetera)

Now, back in those days, tabletop gaming wasn't quite the hobby it is today, especially for kids at that age.  We didn't have these newfangled complex mechanics and story-driven campaigns and gosh darn gorgeous art and extremely detailed miniatures.  I mean, those things existed, but I certainly didn't have access to them.

No, for me at that time, a board game was literally a board with some art on it (occasionally pretty good art, to be fair) and some player pieces.  In those days the classic gameplay mechanic was rolling a die to see how far you moved, then moving that many spaces and finding out what happened to you.  There would occasionally be some minor decision-making, but most of the games I played boiled down to a contest to see which player could roll higher numbers more often.  And yet I loved them.

Still, it wasn't really a hobby that I took into my teenage years.  By that time I had video games and anime and hormones, so there wasn't much room for board games, I guess?  Oh, I was also always alone, so that was a factor.  In fact, that was a factor that made me invest in the Castle Ravenloft board game somewhere in my late teens, because it could be played solo!  Too bad the apartment we lived in at the time didn't really have any room to set it up.  Woops.

On the other hand, I also lived through the boom of trading card games.  Seriously, I have owned, or at least played, probably more than fifty unique TCGs in my days.  It started with Magic: The Gathering, of course, but if you can name it there's a good chance I played it, either then or since.  I loved the Pokemon TCG when it was new, to the point that it's still the only tabletop game I've ever played against strangers competitively.  I didn't do well.

I had tons of Digimon cards, tons of Dragonball Z cards, I tried the X-Men card game (once) and I don't even like X-Men!  Rage, Vampire, NetRunner, Star Wars CCG, several other Star Wars games that were nowhere near as good as the CCG, Wizard in Training (totally not a Harry Potter ripoff), the actual Harry Potter card game, MLB Showdown (for some reason), Magi-Nation Duel (oh, we'll be coming back to this one), Yu-Gi-Oh!, Duel Masters, the original World of Warcraft card game, Calorie Kids!

I want it to be understood that that last one isn't a joke.  As a kid, I saw the artwork of Calorie Kids on some TCG website or another, announcing it as a new game.  It might have been the first thing I ever pre-ordered.  It turned out to be so bad and so short-lived that it doesn't even have a Wikipedia page.  In fact, the only real substantial bit of evidence I could find that it ever even existed is the website of one of the game's artists, linked here.

Lead is a valuable source of iron, and I am
a valuable source of lame jokes.

Looking at it now, it's definitely the game I remember, but I can't for the life of me tell you why I was so excited about it.  I guess as a kid I just liked anything vaguely action cartoon-like?  I know I liked the blue guy with the knife in the group picture on that website, whose name I am almost certain was Bluberi or something along those lines.  It's obvious to (somewhat more) adult eyes that the game was apparently trying to be educational?  About nutrition?  I mean, I guess that was the intent, but I really don't see how they planned for it to accomplish that goal, unless proper nutrition somehow involves guns.  Although, as an American that's not all that outlandish.

Also, it basically played like War.  Y'know, the card game you play when you're tired of Old Maid and Go Fish and you literally don't know any other card games?  Just imagine that but with slightly fancier (or at least more colorful) artwork.  It's clear that the creators of Calorie Kids, Ocean of Wisdom (who also don't have a Wikipedia page), like many edutainment companies before them, took the most cynical outlook possible: kids will buy anything with brightly-colored characters, and anything is educational if it has vaguely educational-sounding themes.  And yes, it worked on a previous form of me, but I played it once and never bought more cards.  That is literally the opposite of a sustainable business model.

Still, it wasn't all bad.  I think people tend to look back on that period of time as an endless sea of pointless cash-ins and garbage games, and yes that was a real problem.  But there were, at the very least, a small handful of very good games, many of them, in my opinion, better than Magic.

The original Star Wars CCG was, to my eyes, the greatest licensed tabletop game of its era, and is still played in unofficial tournaments to this day.  NetRunner may very well be the finest game Richard Garfield (the original creator of Magic, by the way) ever created, and was remade a few years ago by Fantasy Flight as Android: NetRunner, a great game in its own right.  Pokemon is still being published, and I never played the Legend of the Five Rings card game but it was, for a very long time, the second-oldest TCG to still be published, only finally ceasing publication twenty years after its inception.  Oh, and it's also been remade by Fantasy Flight, so it's technically still going, albeit no longer collectible.  And Magi-Nation.  Oh, the tragedy of Magi-Nation.

It's this small handful of games that deserve to be remembered.  To use a wrestling reference, they are the Eddie Guerreros, the CM Punks, the Daniel Bryans of their industry.  They will never be as mainstream or as marketable as the John Cenas and the Roman Reignses (here represented by Magic), but they are just as deserving of our appreciation, and in many ways, they're even better.

But not Calorie Kids.  Calorie Kids is the Gobbledy Gooker.

Tune in next time, when we'll go into detail about my more recent fascination with tabletop gaming as a hobby, and maybe even find out what my favorite tabletop game is.  Exciting!

Until next time!

Current interests:
Listening - Lofi hip hop radio
Playing - Resident Evil 4 (PS4, 2016)
Reading - Paperbacks From Hell (Grady Hendrix, 2017)
Watching - Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return (2017)

Pictured: Calorie Kids

Check This Out: Power Rangers - Heroes of the Grid

Hello again!  I've been hanging around, figuring out this year's Blogtober, playing some games here and there, but I'm here today to talk about something a little unusual for me: a Kickstarter project.

Not mine, someone else's.

See, I've been a fan of Power Rangers since it started, literally.  I was only three years old at the time, but that certainly didn't stop me from falling in love with it.  I was not an outlier, by any means, since it seems like most boys (and girls) of that age were just as into it as I was.  Power Rangers was everywhere, and on everything.

Dude, I had a Power Rangers-themed pretend shaving kit.  That is not a joke.  Don't believe me?

Well, I found one on eBay, sucka!

Clarification: The child pictured is not me, though I did have that haircut.  We all did.

So you might say I was really into Power Rangers.  A mental health professional might say I was "dangerously obsessed," but Dr. Renfroe doesn't even read my blog, so his opinion doesn't matter.

Anyway, not a whole lot has changed since those days, except for the quality of licensed goods available.  Case in point: Power Rangers - Heroes of the Grid.

(Image property of Renegade Game Studios)

This is a new Power Rangers-themed board game currently being funded through Kickstarter.  Well, I say "being funded," but it actually hit its funding goal in less than 8 hours and now we're just crushing stretch goals left and right.

The game is being produced by Renegade Game Studios, and it looks pretty sweet.  It's a co-op game for 2-5 players (2-6 if you have enough rangers), each player taking on the role of a ranger protecting the city of Angel Grove from the forces of evil. If you're interested you can lean all the details from the Kickstarter page linked above, but for now I'll just give you my thoughts on it so far.

Let me first say that I am not involved with Renegade or the creation of the game in an official capacity.  I'm backing the game (preferably at the top-tier "Morphin Master" level, but I might have to drop down to the "Go Go Power Rangers" level since things are kinda tight at the moment), and I've posted a few comments on the Kickstarter page.  But outside of those things, I have no role in the game's production, and I'm not receiving any sort of kickback or payment for writing this post.  I just want to tell you about something that I'm really excited about.

So with that out of the way, I'll just quickly go over my observations.

The Wanna-Be Ranger is back!

(Image property of Renegade Game Studios)

First off, everything looks gorgeous.  Great artwork abounds, a good portion of it by Dan Mora, who does a lot of artwork for the Power Rangers comics by Boom! Studios.  His stuff is fantastic, and getting him involved was not only a big win, it was practically required.  

Beyond the 2D artwork, I love the miniatures.  They're big and detailed, and from what I've seen they look to be of pretty high quality.  I love that each ranger is molded in the proper color plastic, and I can't even tell you how excited I was when they added Primator as a monster for one of the stretch goals.  He was my favorite monster as a kid, and I honestly never would have expected to see him in any third-party stuff.

From what I've seen of the gameplay, I have to say it looks pretty fun.  I was really afraid it would would be a case of style over substance, but I'm happy to say that doesn't seem to be the case.  The whole "cards as health" mechanic is really interesting, and there's just a cool "simple but challenging" feel I get from the whole thing.  There really seems to be a feeling of being on the backfoot when the game starts but slowly fighting back and building up your powerbase until you can turn things around and take the momentum for yourself.  It almost reminds me of my favorite tabletop game, Sentinels of the Mulitverse, and it really seems to fit that Power Rangers feeling.

Add to that the sheer amount of stuff that comes with it, as long as you're pledged to one of the higher tiers.  Two Kickstarter-exclusive expansions (I'll come back to that), tons and tons of miniatures, and even a non-exclusive expansion based around the Boom! Comics Shattered Grid storyline, which features Lord Drakkon (the villain of that storyline), not to mention all of the main characters from the Power Rangers HyperForce live play RPG series.  That is amazing, especially since the blue ranger from that series is portrayed by Andre from Black Nerd Comedy.

Think about that for a second: I'll get to play one of my favorite YouTubers (and I will be playing as him, you can bet your bottom dollar) as a Power Ranger in an official Power Rangers board game.  Like, where do we even go from here?


I do, of course, have some qualms and concerns.  Chief among those involves some of the Kickstarter exclusives.  I understand having exclusives as a nice little incentive for people to back the project rather than just let it go by.  I'm totally on board with that, and whether or not I stick with the top tier, I will be getting all the Kickstarter exclusives.  But there is one problem.  The Green Ranger.

Tommy, the Green Ranger, as a playable character is currently listed as a Kickstarter-exclusive reward for the project hitting the stretch goal of $315,000 USD, which it will most likely hit in just a few hours.  I don't have a problem with him being a stretch goal, but I do have a problem with him being a Kickstarter exclusive.

The thing is that Tommy (as the Green Ranger) is intrinsic to actually capturing the essence of the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.  You could potentially make the same argument for the villainous Lord Zedd as well as Tommy's later form as the White Ranger, but they weren't added to the show until the second season.  The Green Ranger, on the other hand, is a fan-favorite character added to the show during a fan-favorite story arc in the first season.

To put it in other terms, imagine an X-Men game without Wolverine, or a DC Comics game without Batman, or a Godzilla game without King Ghidorah.  None of these characters are my favorites, but those games would feel incomplete without them, and a MMPR board game without the Green Ranger would be, in my humble opinion, just that: incomplete.

Again, to clarify, I am getting these exclusives.  I will have the Green Ranger, and therefore, a complete experience, so I'm not just whining to get what I want.  I'm actually thinking about this from the point of view of the game's longevity.  If I weren't involved in this Kickstarter, if I didn't know anything about it, and a year from now when the game is out (hopefully), I saw it in my FLGS (shout out to GameKnight Games in Winnipeg), I would get very excited.  I'd start looking into it and ultimately find out that it's now impossible to ever get the Green Ranger for the game.  Armed with this knowledge, it is extremely likely that I would not buy the game.  And I can't be the only person who would have that reaction.  It just seems like a decision that's going to hurt the game in the long run.

Still, Renegade has taken steps to make the Kickstarter exclusives more easily available.  When the campaign started, the minimum tier to get the stretch goal exclusives was $150, but they've since added a $90 option that includes all the exclusives, minus the Green with Evil and White Light expansions and the extra Rita Repulsa miniature.  This makes what I consider to be the complete base set experience relatively cheap, and competitive with other games on the market that contain this much plastic.  But part of me still hopes they'll ultimately decide to release the Green Ranger at retail as a separate character pack or the like.

But hey, maybe I'm making it out to be a bigger deal than it is.  It's not enough to make me choose not to go for it out of principle or something like that.  No no, I am fully on board for the game, and my favorite of the Mighty Morphin Rangers (Adam, the second Black Ranger) isn't even in the game!  And, like I said, I'll be getting all the things, so at the end of the day I'm happy.

Despite my complaints, this is a project I'm very excited about, so much so that I decided to try to use whatever minuscule amount of influence I may have to try and get more eyes aimed in its direction.  I'll even be adding the Kicktraq chart for it to the blog (at the bottom of the page)

If you are or have ever been a Power Rangers fan, here's the link again, definitely check it out.  If you like what you see, back the game, watch the gameplay videos, like the updates, and join us in the comments section.  You might just see me there.

Until next time!

Current interests:
Listening - Various
Playing - World of Warcraft
Reading - Power Rangers: Shattered Grid (Boom! Studios, 2018)
Watching - Five Deadly Venoms (1978)

He's outie 5000!
(Image property of Renegade Game Studios)

*snaps fingers*

And just like that, six months have gone by.  Woops.

Hello hello, I'm still alive! *scattered applause*  Now if only I had a good reason for why I've been away so long.

It would be great to say that I went on a sudden, whirlwind tour of Europe (even though that would actually be a miserable experience for me), or that I had finally gotten my acceptance letter to Ilvermorny (17 years late), or, I dunno, something involving time travel.  Really, any decent excuse would be something, but nope.  I just sort of stopped.  I don't want to totally blame World of Warcraft, but it certainly didn't help.

But none of that matters now, because I'm back, and I'm ready for action!  So, what's new?

Well for starters, October is right around the corner, which means the second annual Blogtober will be revving up to go pretty soon.  I already have this year's movie lest finalized, more or less, but I'm currently thinking of ways I can change up the formula to make it a bit less of a marathon for me.  I'm not gonna lie, the way I did it last year was pretty stressful and exhausting, to the point where I just crashed once it was over.  But it's something I love, and I definitely want to do it again, I'm just ironing out the best way to do so.

Besides that, I don't have any solid plans for new posts just yet.  I definitely have a lot of things I want to talk about, and I'm still trying to figure out the best way to present Vault of the Obscure.  But I'm going to take things slowly to begin with any not make any promises just yet.

Still,  I'm very excited to be back, and October looks like it's once again going to be a wild ride.  Join me, won't you?

Until next time!

Current Interests:
Listening - The Very Best of Daryl Hall & John Oates (2001)
Playing - World of Warcraft
Reading - Paperbacks From Hell (Grady Hendrix, 2017)
Watching - Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers (1993)

Sickness update (February 21, 2018)

So I'm still sick, but getting much better.  I also have houseguests at the moment, so that's complicating my schedule just a wee bit, not to mention all the time I've been spending in bed angrily trying to force myself to be well again.

All things considered, though, and barring any complications, we should be back to our regularly scheduled program starting next Monday, February 26.

Thank you for your patience.  Now I'm going back to bed.

I'm sick :(

So yeah,  I appear to have been struck down in my prime with a virulent plague.  There will, therefore, be no post today.  I deeply apologize.

Tell my wife I love her.

Vault of the Obscure Introduction

Hello hello hello!  Yes, I'm aware I totally missed last Friday's post.  That was all my fault, I made some miscalculations regarding when certain things were happening, and it kind of got missed.  Sorry about that.

But that's okay, because I'll be posting last Friday's article right now, in addition to another post tomorrow evening.  For this first part, I'm very happy to finally be formally introducing the Vault of the Obscure!  I've mentioned this new series before, but just in case you're new around here, allow me to bring you up to speed.

The Vault of the Obscure is a mysterious place, located deep within the recesses of the obsessive part of my mind.  The collection housed within, though initially seeming slapdash and haphazard, is rather a feverishly-cultivated gallery of the hidden, the forgotten, and the obscure.  This could mean a random television show you've never heard of, but it's usually a bit more focused than that.  I am the curator, after all, and so this collection is particular to me and my interests.

See, when I get into something, I get way into it.  Let's say, for example, that I one day become interested in (fictional) video game series Dwarfstone.  Well, I'd start playing the game, of course, but I wouldn't stop there.  I'd watch the Dwarfstone animated series, not to mention the awful live action Dwarfstone movie from the '80s.  I'd even track down a copy of the brilliant but short-lived '90s comic book adaptation, the one that managed to perfectly capture everything great about the video games in one self-contained, twelve-issue epic.

And maybe it wouldn't even stop there.  I mean, we all remember the Dwarfstone toys, right?  Well, I'd read about those and lament the fact that I got rid of the ones I had as a kid, since they're ridiculously expensive now. Oh well.

Wait, what?  There was a Dwarfstone soundtrack?  And a tabletop roleplaying game?  And a cereal???

Now, Dwarfstone may not technically be a real thing, but it offers up a perfect example of what I want to highlight.  Here we have a long-running franchise that started as a series of pretty good video games, that eventually branched its way out into every kind of media you can think of.  And yet, with the passage of time, and maybe a reboot of the series here and there, these things often get left behind, and become little more than faded memories.

The problem is, a lot of times these things don't deserve to be forgotten.  And that's exactly why I created the Vault of the Obscure.  I've taken it upon myself to, in some small way, catalog the flotsam and jetsam of pop culture in the way I know best: by writing about it.  It won't always be a spin-off from a popular franchise, there's no real overarching plan, no road map to follow.  It'll just be me, as the Keeper of the Vault, bringing a new curiosity to your attention every week, more or less.

Vault of the Obscure won't be replacing the things I usually post, such as Confirmed Kills or Worth Your Time.  Instead, it will allow me to have a steadier stream of content, since those two things are highly situational and fairly inconsistent.  But don't worry, I'm still hacking away at finishing games, and I have plans for other things in the future.

For now, though, the Vault will be the focus around here.  Not only will it allow me to more consistently have new things to talk about, but it will hopefully play into my attention-deficit nature by always giving me something new to focus on.

And so, with all that said, I hope you guys are half as excited as I am about all this new stuff.  Like I said, the first entry in the Vault will be up tomorrow evening, plus the regularly scheduled post on Friday.  Look forward to it!

For the record, that Dwarfstone cereal is gross.  Don't eat it.

Until next time!

Current interests:
Listening - Various
Playing - Euro Truck Simulator 2 (2012)
Reading - Judge Dredd Complete Case File 05 (2003)
Watching - Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return (2017)

Confirmed Kill: DOOM (1993)

Title: DOOM

Original Release: December 10, 1993 (MS-DOS)

Finished Release: The Ultimate DOOM (1995) [Modded]

Oh, here we go.

So let's be straight with each other right from the beginning.  See, you don't need me to write this review.  If you're my age or older (or even several years younger), you've probably played DOOM.  If you haven't played it you probably know someone who has.  No matter your age, the odds are very high that you've heard of it, and seen bits and pieces of it here and there.

So much has been said about what a masterpiece this game is, and you don't need me to tell you it's all true.  Beyond that, I don't even know if I could do the game any justice by attempting to be analytical towards it.  This game and the legacy it created is so much bigger than me that all I can really offer you is an explanation of what it means to me.  So that's all I'm going to do.

The shareware version of DOOM was originally released six days after my fourth birthday, so my memories of its beginning are hazy at best, and almost certainly unreliable.  Even once I was older I can't remember ever really playing it all that much myself.  I definitely started it, probably several times, but my attention span then was somehow worse than it is now.  It was also probably a bit too difficult for me, if I had to guess.

Instead, my earliest memories of DOOM are of my dad playing it.  He was still in his early twenties at the time, and PC gaming was always his thing, and so of course DOOM was installed on every computer he built for years to come.  I can vaguely remember him starting it up on new computers all throughout my childhood, just to see how it ran on the new hardware.

In a lot of ways, DOOM is to Wolfenstein 3D what Super Mario Bros. 3 is to Super Mario Bros.  That is to say, the original showed what a particular style of game could do, while the follow-up showed what that same style of game could be.  I'll always love Wolf3D, and it may have more or less created the FPS genre, but DOOM made sure it was here to stay.

And we can't forget shovelware!

The reason for that is that DOOM is more than just one amazing game.  Sure, it had a sequel the next year, and it was great too, but that's really just one part of the wave that DOOM brought with it.  This was the Age of the FPS, and it's an era that lasted for more than a decade and was responsible for some of my fondest memories.  I miss those days, but I'm happy that I now live in a

n age where it's easier than ever to appreciate them.

And beyond that, nostalgia has brought about a resurgence of interest in games from that time.  New, awesome mods for DOOM are still being made to this day (such as this one), and that's to say nothing of the throwback games currently being developed.  DUSK looks amazing. Amid Evil is basically a new version of Heretic.  And there's rumblings that 3D Realms is even developing a new game using the Build Engine, the same development suite used to make Duke Nukem 3D.  It's a great time to be a gamer.

And yet, with all that said, I still never got around to actually sitting down and playing it through until now, just under a year shy of its 25th anniversary.  I dunno what took me so long, but I expected greatness, and I was not disappointed.

In the interest of clarity, I'll just quickly explain that I played through all four episodes of The Ultimate DOOM release currently available on Steam and GOG.  I applied the latest release of fan mod GZDoom, but the only options I had applied were a more modern mouse and keyboard control scheme (but still with no Y axis) and a larger screen resolution.  I played on the neutral difficulty level, Hurt Me Plenty, and didn't put any great effort into finding secrets.

My amazement with DOOM began before I had even reached the title screen, right from the staff credits screen:

The sheer amount of talent represented on that screen is staggering.  You have the obvious ones, like John Carmack, John Romero, and Adrian Carmack, all founding fathers of id Software and titans in their own right.  But then you also have names like American McGee, who would later create the underrated American McGee's Alice just a few years later, which was one of my favorite games as a kid.  And my personal favorite on this list, Sandy Petersen, creator of the classic Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG.   Not only that, but he would later go on to create one of my favorite board games, Cthulhu Wars, and here he is designing levels for one of the most influential games of all time.

Anyway, I then went on to start up the game itself, and a weird thing happened: the controls threw me off.  I don't know if it was because I had gotten so used to Wolf3D or if DOOM is just that particular, but it didn't feel the way I expected it to.  There's this momentum-based movement that was strange at first, where it takes a split second to get up to full speed and another split second to stop. It took me a while to get used to.

And when I say "a while" I actually mean 30 seconds.  At most.  Because as strange as the whole thing felt at first blush, it immediately became second-nature.  By the end of the game movement in DOOM had become an automatic function of my biology so that I all I needed to be concerned about was killing demons... and switch puzzles.

There was also some D&D mixed in.

Other than that, everything is exactly what everyone else says it is.  The graphics are bright and colorful, but in a way that it still brings across the gloomy and deadly atmosphere.  I especially loved how the locations slowly transitioned away from the futuristic colony feeling and more into a very hard rock version of Hell itself.

In fact, "hard rock," is a good thing to bring up, since the whole game is just metal.  From the soundtrack itself (sometimes liberally borrowed from bands such as Black Sabbath and the like) to the creature designs, the whole game just feels like you stepped into a rock album, and I meant that in the best possible way.  Just look at the game cover up there; it perfectly captures the feel of the game.

Except for that other space marine.  I dunno why he's there.

It's difficult for me to find bad things to say about this game.  I can look at it as a whole, and I can tell you that it's not perfect, but I'd be hard-pressed to tell you why.  I mean, I guess the very fact that I had to mod the control scheme is technically a point against it, but that's not really the fault of the game.  Some of the levels aren't as good as the rest, maybe?

I dunno, I'm genuinely trying to come up with negative things and I find myself at a loss.  Logically speaking, nothing is perfect.  But DOOM is just so enjoyable that looking back over it I guess I manage to ignore the little things that may have bothered me when I was playing it.  It is the game that every other game like it was measured against for years after for good reason, and it still puts up a good fight against most games released since. I fully believe that it will continue to be looked upon as one of the best the genre has ever had to offer for years and years to come.

Hell, I'd play it again right now.

Until next time!

Current interests:

Listening - Various

Playing - DOOM II (1994)

Reading - Thor: God of Thunder (2011)

Watching - Lazy Game Reviews

I'm apocryphal!

Confirmed Kill: Spear of Destiny

Title: Spear of Destiny

Original Release: MS-DOS (September 18, 1992)

Finished Release: MS-DOS (1992) [Modded]

So this is weird.  I'm sure you remember Wolfenstein 3D, which we talked about last time (and you can read about rightcha).  I'll just quickly reiterate that, even though it wasn't technically the first "first person shooter" ever made, it essentially created the genre.  Admittedly, the follow-up, DOOM (which we'll be discussing soon, possibly) solidified that the genre was actually going somewhere, but Wolf3D was the first big stepping stone.

And yet no one ever talks about the sequel.  I'll admit up front that I'm nothing like a gaming historian or anything like that, but I'm pretty sure that I had never even heard of this game before I bought the pack on Steam.  But it does exist, I played it, and you have to read about it, so here we go.

So here's a big spoiler for the original Wolfenstein 3D: it ends with you, as B.J. Blazkowicz, killing Adolf Hitler (who's in a robot suit), thus presumably bringing an end to World War II.  That's pretty sweet and obviously historically accurate, but it creates a problem: where do you go from there?

Well, that's a question left unanswered, since Spear of Destiny, much like the Nocturnal Missions from the original game, takes place before any of that.  In fact, Spear of Destiny takes place before even those add-on missions, thus making this B.J. Blazkowicz's first mission, at least as far as we're allowed to play.  And his mission this time is an interesting one, as we're tasked with infiltrating a Nazi base in order to retrieve the titular Spear of Destiny, which Hitler's forces intend to use in some sort of supernatural powerplay to turn the tide of the war in their favor.

I warned you that you should get used to it.

It's actually kind of difficult to talk about Spear of Destiny, because it's basically just more of Wolfenstein 3D, and in that respect it succeeds, mostly.  The first big change I noticed was that one of the early levels has vines hanging from the ceiling that you can walk through, which I thought was really cool the first time I saw it.  Unfortunately things like this almost completely obscure your vision, and the creators seemed to really enjoy throwing bunches of enemies into them, making those sections sheer trial and error as you try to learn where all of the enemies are without dying.  Still, it's a cool effect.

But when I say that Spear of Destiny is just more of Wolfenstein 3D, I really mean it.  The enemies look the same, the level textures are often the same, the weapons are the same, and that's pretty much it.  The previously-mentioned vines notwithstanding, the only majorly new things are the bosses, but they did not disappoint.  Sure, the first boss is literally just a reskin of the first boss of Wolf3D, but the rest are unique, at least in design, and the final boss is genuinely surprising when you see it, possibly on par with robo-Hitler.  And one of them (the best one, obviously), is an Ubermutant!

"Ubermutant" literally means "it's a mutant, but better, obviously," in German.

In terms of complexity, the Spear of Destiny levels feel like they pick up directly from where Wolf3D left off, and this is, unfortunately, almost always a bad thing.  The labyrinthine feeling of the Nocturnal Missions is back in all its glory, and it really gets to the point where each level starts to feel like more and more of a slog.  This doesn't detract from the overall atmosphere of the game itself, which I still love, but I had easily had my fill of it by the end of SoD's 27 levels (not including secret levels).

So like I said above, the Spear of Destiny campaign is 27 levels, not counting secret levels, which is just as many as the original three episodes of Wolfenstein 3D put together.  The difference here is that the game isn't broken into episodes.  Instead it's just one continuous set of levels, with a boss level every five or so.  Some levels are fun, some are ridiculously frustrating, but it's overall a positive experience, and the final level features a twist that I knew was coming, yet somehow didn't see coming.  I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that it's worth playing through the whole game just for that, but it definitely made the whole experience that much more memorable.

And then you finish that level, you get a few story scenes congratulating you for a job well done, and the game is over.  OR IS IT?

Well, no.

See, Spear of Destiny was followed up by two "Mission Packs," referred to as Mission 2: Return to Danger and Mission 3: Ultimate Challenge, and these things... hoo boy.

See, after all the trouble you went through to steal the Spear from the Nazis, it gets stolen back from the Allies offscreen, and only B.J. Blazkowicz can get it back.  That's irritating right off the bat (that will be a pun in a second), but whatever.  Let's get this over with.  27 new levels! Here we go!

So first, the cool: the mission packs are actually a total conversion for the game.  Basically what that means is that everything plays exactly like Wolfenstein 3D, but it's been completely overhauled, graphically speaking.  The stage textures have all been redesigned, as have the enemy sprites, weapons, and items.  After the entirety of the first game and the base missions of Spear, this was a very welcome change, if for no other reason than just having something new to look at.  It helps that the updated designs are almost universally improvements on the old look of the game.

Everything's so blue...

The new enemy designs are especially good with one glaring omission, which I'll get to in a moment.  For the most part, the new designs do a great job of preserving the feel of the original designs, while not being quite so cartoony.   The one big exception to this is the mutant.  Why?  Because it isn't a mutant anymore.  Seriously, my favorite enemy is the one that gets completely changed, because of course.  And that wouldn't be so bad, but what did it get changed to?

A bat.  A bat, flapping around, carrying machine guns in its feet.  Now don't get me wrong, Wolfenstein is at its best when it's straining credulity, but this just breaks it in two.  And it raises so many questions!  Who's training these bats to fire guns?  Who's designing the guns so that they can be held and fired by bat-feet??  And the most pertinent follow-up question to both of those is Why???  Not to mention that the bats are hard to see, thus them ten times as frustrating as the mutants ever were, and the mutants were already on that spectrum.

Pictured: Bat-feet

But other than that, Mission 2 is fine, right?  'Cause it's just more Wolfenstein 3D again?  Well, no, because it's here where the game starts making a cardinal mistake.  This is something I was afraid of for the entirety of the original game, but by this point had convinced myself wasn't going to happen.

So remember how the secrets worked in Wolf3D?  Certain walls could just be interacted with, so you could push them out of the way, revealing the secret behind them?  Remember how much I hated that system?  Yeah, well, here it's needed to progress.  Let me make that clearer: in order to complete this game, you are required to find pushwalls.  This means vast stretches of time were you're running throughout the entirety of a given level, pounding the spacebar like it insulted your mother, all in the hopes of finally revealing the path forward.

There is almost never any indication of which part of the wall is the one you're looking for, and the levels are huge.  And this doesn't just happen once or twice, it quickly becomes normal.  It isn't fun, it isn't engaging, and it doesn't make you feel any sense of accomplishment when you finally figure it out.  It is the very definition of a waste of time.

Eat your heart out, Skeletor.

But hey, new bosses!  On the whole I don't think they're quite as interesting as the ones in the base Spear of Destiny game, but they're still pretty cool, for the most part.  Hell, one of them, "The Axe" is probably my favorite boss in the series.  He looks like an '80s cartoon villain!

But yeah, you get the Spear (again), they pull the exact same twist again, show the exact same ending scenes, and the game is over.

Don't get me wrong, there's still fun to be had here, and the new look of everything, for the most part, does a lot to freshen things up.  But it's clear to see that we're getting further and further away from the trendsetter the original Wolfenstein 3D was.

And then we come to Mission 3, and I honestly don't know why they bothered.  The Spear has been stolen by the Nazis.  Again.  The graphics are the same as Mission 2.  The enemies are the same.  The pushwalls are the same, the bosses are the same, the ending is the same (again.), it's just all the same.  Except that by this point, each level has gone past the point of being a slog, and well into the realm of tedium.

The only real saving grace of this mission pack is the final level.  It pulls the same twist for the third time, but there's a clever little tweak to it that I quite enjoyed, so that was a pleasant surprise.

But overall, Mission 3 is an exercise in patience, and I can't recommend it to anyone unless you're absolutely dying to play more Wolfenstein 3D.  Even then, you could probably easily find a fanmade mod that would be a better use of your time.

So, at the end of the day, Spear of Destiny and its add-ons are a mixed bag with more bad than good.  There's fun to be had, but it's hard to recommend any of it outright.  Honestly, the best thing to do is probably to mod the original Wolfenstein 3D so that it uses the graphics introduced to Mission 2.  But even that isn't much of a good idea, because then you'd have no mutants.

And no one wants that.

Until next time!

Current interests:
Listening - Various
Playing - Elite Dangerous: Horizons (2015)
Reading - Thor: God of Thunder (2011)
Watching - Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

Why do you exist?!

Announcements and Upcoming Plans 2018.1

I've been on vacation and completely neglected to mention that!  Oops.

But yeah, all sorts of things have been going on over here.  My roommate went to Florida for a few days, so my wife Jessie and I decided to just enjoy having the house to ourselves.  Unfortunately Jess caught a bad cold, so a lot of our time was actually spent with her feeling poorly.

On a more positive note, my sister-in-law is currently visiting with her daughter.  Jessie and I haven't seen our niece since she was a baby, so this has been our first chance to really interact with her, which has been a lot of fun.  I've always felt like I would be a good dad but an awesome uncle.

Oh, I've also been playing a blue ton of Elite Dangerous.  I'm actually supercruising to a space station as I write this post.  So yeah, you could say I've been distracted.

But that's okay, because I'm still here, and I actually have a lot of announcements to make regarding upcoming posts.  So without further ado or adon't, let's get to it!

Announcement Numero Uno: I am happy to announce that I will now be keeping to a specific schedule for blog posts.  Starting today and continuing into the foreseeable future, new posts will go up on Monday and Friday.  Specifically, I'll be writing a post every Monday and Friday afternoon, to be posted in the evening, after they've been checked over and whatnot.

There's no hard schedule as to what kind of posts will go up when, it'll basically be whatever I have in the tank, but I already have two Confirmed Kills (my laziness has been productive) and a smattering of "obscure stuff" reviews.

Speaking of which, I'm also here to officially announce the title of that series: Vault of the Obscure!.  And yes, the exclamation point is part of the title.  I'll have the first of those posts up either Monday or Friday of next week (so either February 5th or 9th) depending on how things work out.  This is something I'm really excited to get started on, and I hope you guys enjoy it as much as I will.

On a somewhat related note, you may have noticed some subtle (and not so subtle) changes to the layout of the blog over the past few weeks as I've tried to figure out what works and what doesn't.  I'm generally happy with how it looks right now, but I've still been feeling like it doesn't have enough of its own identity, especially when it comes to each individual series of posts.

And so, with that in mind, I'm going to slowly (as in, over the course of months) be overhauling the site completely, with a new layout, new designs, and official logos and headers for the site itself as well for the different post series, such as Confirmed Kills, Blogtober, and otherwise.  The idea is to give this blog its own identity, as well as give each series its own, slightly different, feel.

But with all that said, that's pretty much all the announcements I have for today.  This Friday, February 2nd, will see the first Confirmed Kill post of the new schedule, so look forward to that, and in the meantime I'll be working hard to make sure I have new stuff to write about all the time.

Until next time!

Current interests:
Listening - Persona 5 Original Soundtrack (2017)
Playing - Elite Dangerous: Horizons (2015)
Reading - Deadlands: Hell on Earth (IDW, 1998)
Watching - The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

Worth Your Time: Civilization VI/Humble Monthly

Boy, time has really gotten away from me.   That first "obscure stuff" post was supposed to be up days ago!  Don't worry, I'm still working on it, I've just hit some snags along the way that have caused some delays.  For now, though, I'm here to tell you about a deal that you can take advantage of right now!

Ugh, forget I said that.  This isn't a sales pitch.

You may have heard of Humble Bundle before.  Maybe you've even partaken of their awesome "cheap bundles of digital content that also provide money to charity" in the past.  If so, good on you!  You're both contributing to a great cause and getting a great deal.  I've personally been taking advantage of the service for a few years now, and I have a ton of awesome stuff to show for it.

Something that's relatively new to me, however, is Humble's monthly subscription service, aptly titled Humble Monthly.  It's sort of like a digital Loot Crate kind of thing, where you pay $12 (USD) a month, and you get a whole slew of digital games delivered to your Humble account.  Each game is attached to a code that you then redeem on Steam, and the game is added to your Steam library.

Now, I've known about the service for a few months now, but I had yet to see any major games on offer that really made me pull the trigger.  Don't get me wrong, it's always great stuff, it's just so far been great stuff that I personally already own or am not interested in.  This month, though, they finally hooked me.

I've been a big fan of the Civilization series ever since I first played Civ3 back in the day.  I've never been great at strategy style games, but I still love to play them every now and then, and Civilization is pretty much my go-to.  Civ5 was, unfortunately, not quite what I was hoping it would be.  I didn't hate it, but it just didn't gel with me at the time for whatever reason.

Still, though, as soon as I heard about Civ6, I knew I would get it eventually.  I was mainly just waiting for a good price to converge with a driving urge to play it.  Well, imagine my excitement when I discovered that Civilization VI is the leading game in this month's Humble Monthly package.

Let me put that into clear terms.  Up until February 1st, you can go to Humble Bundle, pay $12 (USD) to sign up for Humble Monthly, and get Civilization VI, plus two DLC packs for it (Australia Civlization & Scenario Pack and Vikings Scenario Pack), plus a whole host of other games that haven't been revealed yet.  And just to top it off, you also get 10% off any purchases made in the Humble store, and that even applies to things that are already on sale.

So naturally, I jumped at the deal, and am now a Humble Monthly member.  I can't say now whether I'll stay signed up permanently, but it's safe to say I'll hang around for at least a couple months.

But what about Civilization VI?  Well, I blazed through that signup process and installed the game ASAP.  According to my Steam page, I've already put 21 hours into it, and I've been having a blast.  Before I get into my specific thoughts on the game, though, I'd like to take a second to address something up front.

See, here's the thing: there's this weird controversy surrounding the game that I genuinely don't understand, but it seems to orbit around the prospect of DLC for the game.  Basically, the base game comes with 18 Civilizations (19 if you count the fact that Greece has two separate leaders, but we'll ignore that), and other Civs can be bought as DLC for between $4.99 and $8.99 USD (the more expensive ones come with two Civilizations).

If you go to the Steam store page for pretty much any piece of DLC for the game (and the game itself, to an extent), you'll see them awash with scathing reviews.  These negative reviews are almost always centered around the fact that DLC exists for the game at all.  People accuse 2K Games and Firaxis of cutting this content out of the base game just to charge more for it.  They make the accusation that the base game is basically just a demo, and suggest you have to buy all of these Civilizations in order to actually own the "complete" game.

Now, let's ignore for a moment the fact that we live in a world in which EA Games bases their entire business model around "games as a service," squeezing every nickel they can out of every game they make for the smallest amount of effort possible, thus making these accusations comparatively laughable.

No, instead let's focus on the fact that, back in 2010, Civilization V also launched with 18 civilizations.  Let's talk about the fact that Civilization V's store page also has extra Civilizations on sale as DLC and still charges a minimum of $4.99 USD for this DLC for an eight-year-old game.  And let's talk about the fact that not a single damn review on the base game's store page has anything negative to say about this whatsoever.

Look, if you don't like DLC, that's fine.  Personally I think the question of "yes" or "no" for DLC is a complicated one.  It's difficult to get it right, but I love it when it happens (like Super Smash Bros.) because I always want more content in my games.  But if you are the type of person that just rejects any DLC on principle, well, that's cool for you, and I honestly can't wholeheartedly disagree with you.

The issue here is the double standard.  You have two games, six years apart, that do the exact same thing (something that has only become more common in those six years, and will continue to do so), and yet one is given a free pass.  Why???  Admittedly, the one dual civilization pack for Civ5 is cheaper than the dual packs for Civ6 by about $1.50, but you're still talking about an eight-year-old game!  And they still charge the exact same price for their major expansions as what Civ6 will be charging for the upcoming Rise and Fall expansion ($29.99 USD).  The mind boggles.

But enough of that rant, because it went on for way too long.  The game itself has so far definitely lived up to what I hoped it would be.  It's not perfect, and some of the complaints on the Steam store page are legitimate, but overall I've really enjoyed myself.  Like I said, I've only put about 21 hours into it across two campaigns, but I'll talk a bit about what I liked and disliked, based on my little bit of exposure.

First off, I absolutely love the character designs.  I mean, I guess you'd call them character designs, even though the civilization leaders are real people.  Either way, they look like something out of Disney's recent CG movies like Frozen or Big Hero 6, and I mean that in the best possible way.  They're the perfect kind of cartoony: expressive and full of life, but not so over-the-top that you can't take them seriously.

I also really like that the research tree and the civics tree have been separated, thus allowing you to learn two things at once.  This is, for me, a very welcome change, since I was always annoyed that I couldn't learn how to make a bow & arrow because I was too busy learning what a law is.  Like, what?  On a related note, I also like how easy it is to customize your government.  You still pick an overall system of government, but now you acquire different "civics cards" as you progress through your Civics tree.  These cards give you different bonuses or focuses in addition to what you get from your base government choice.  And these bonuses can be swapped out for others at pretty much any time to focus on what you need at any given moment.  It's a really cool system that gives you that extra bit of fluidity and adaptability.

And the last thing I want to focus on is the big one: districts.  Basically, when building the area around your city, you can now add city districts.  There's quite a few of these districts, such as a harbor, business district, theatre district, etc., and they all serve a different purpose.  Each district takes up one of the hexes in your city's region, with each district getting certain bonuses from surrounding hexes.  Now, on the one hand, this could cause you to have to give up a valuable food space or a productive mine, but these districts are crucial to the growth of your city.  You can't have a school without a campus, you can't have boats without a harbor, and you can't have religion without a holy site.

The districts system is probably my favorite new feature of Civ6 because it's just so cool.  Even just having played two campaigns, I've already had to make some serious decisions over whether or not a certain district is worth it to a certain city, and sometimes it's not.  I found myself, more often than not, focusing each city on one or two particular districts (Boston, of course, focused on the campus), but if you learn the game and are pretty good with your ability to think ahead, I could easily see someone really getting as much benefit as possible out of each and every city.  It's just a really great system, and I'd love to see it expanded even further in a future update or something.

Like I said before, though, Civ6 isn't perfect, and it definitely has some room for improvements.  For one thing, I found myself clicking around the UI trying to find things a bit more often than I would like.  For another, sometimes the game suffers from these really weird pauses.  Like, not like the game itself will freeze, but you'll click "next turn" or whatever, and it just idles there for a while, and sometimes I have to click it three or four times to get it to go.

Also, as much as the DLC civs don't bother me on principle, there is one thing about it that irks me.  The Greek civilization has two leaders, and neither one of them is Alexander the Great!  Don't get me wrong, I fully understand that Alexander has had his time to shine, and at least it's still possible to get him as leader of the Macedon civilization.  Still, I do really wish he were part of the base game, even if it meant just swapping him with someone else I'm not overly fond of.  But hey, at least it helps me decide which DLC pack to buy first.

So far, I'm more than happy with Civilization VI, and what few complaints I have about it are pretty much a non-issue because of how cheaply I got it.  Seriously, I plan to buy all the DLC civilizations over time, and I still won't have spent as much as the normal price for the base game.  I'll also most likely buy the Rise and Fall expansion eventually, if for no other reason than to have even more civilizations because that's what I want!  The game definitely needs a bit of work here and there, but I'm very excited to see where it goes.

Now here's the icky part, because this is where I ask you for a favor.  See, yet another perk for being a member of Humble Monthly is that I now have a special referral link attached to my account.  Basically, what that does is that whenever someone uses that link and signs up for Humble Monthly (up to 30 people), I get a kickback of a few dollars in my Humble wallet, to spend in their store.

Let me make a couple things very clear.  First, Humble has not asked me to write this blog post.  They have no idea who I am (outside of being a moderately recurring customer), and they haven't offered me any special incentive to convince you to sign up.  This is the exact same referral program that you will have access to if you sign up yourself.  No one pays me to type these words.

Secondly, I'm not writing this post because of the referral program.  I was genuinely going to write all this before I even knew about it.  I honestly, wholeheartedly, just want to share what I feel is a great deal for a great game, plus a bunch of extra stuff.  I don't have many recurring readers, but I take my blog and my own sense of honesty very seriously.  I hate deception, and I will never be deceitful for money or rewards.  I say what I believe.

Lastly, and this is the thing I really want to stress, you don't get anything special out of my referral link.  I'm not saying that to be an ass, because I honestly wish I could offer you some sort of special promo or exclusive deal.  But no, outside of all of the regular perks of Humble Monthly (and there really are quite a few), I can't give you anything extra, except for my genuine appreciation.

So yeah, don't sign up for Humble Monthly to help me out.  I'd appreciate it greatly, and I'd use the referral credit to get some new stuff to review.  But don't let that be why you do or do not choose to sign up.  If Humble Monthly doesn't interest you, that's totally cool, and thanks for taking the time to read all this.  And hey, if you do decide to sign up but don't want to click my link just to spite me, well that's cool too.  I won't hold it against you.  Hell, I'll even provide the regular Humble Monthly link, and if you don't trust that, well it's just a quick google away.

My link is here, and the vanilla link is here.

Here's hoping that you have some serious fun, no matter what.

Until next time!

Current interests:
Listening - The Sickness (Disturbed, 2000)
Playing - The Ultimate DOOM (1995)
Reading - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (IDW, 2011)
Watching - The Toys That Made Us (2017)