Edge: The Loner

I forgot to mention this earlier, but for those of you with Amazon Prime accounts there is a fantastic new western in their new set of potential new series.

The series is Edge: The Loner and is based upon the Edge books by George G. Gilman (which I've not read yet) and features Max Martini as the wandering loner. One can only assume that he is trying to make up for being in the 50 Shades of Grey film series... at least IMDB tells me he was in them; I've managed to safely avoid these. It also features Yvonne Strahovski, better known as Sarah from Chuck, as an undercover Pinkerton. I assume in the books this is a recurring character as it is certainly hinted at.

If I didn't know this was from Shane Black (writer of Lethal Weapon, Monster Squad and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang), I would have sworn it was Tarantino trying to do a tv series. The pilot is over the top and certainly not for the faint hearted as it pulls no punches when showing some of the gunfights, but it is a highly enjoyable pulpy western that could, if it gets picked up for a full season, pan out to be something pretty cool.

This may be partially responsible for how much I enjoyed the Fistful of Lead demo earlier...

Has Cthulhu taken over blogger?

I know a few people are suffering problems with Blogger posts not appearing on blogrolls at the correct time. I'm finding it annoying and I don't have many readers, so I can only imagine the pain that some of you are feeling with the delays.

While I wait for Blogger to catch up with itself, I can kick back with the ipad as Modiphius released the Achtung! Cthulhu Investigator's Guide to the backers tonight. It's looking pretty, oh so pretty. Rather than write two separate books, they have separate character creation chapters for Savage Worlds and Call of Cthulhu which will save on duplicating content, but does lead to a little bit of confusion as it's not immediately clear (IMO) that they have done this when you first encounter these chapters. There look to be a few interesting challenges for the Hero Lab work when it comes to character careers, but hey. That's the fun of it, right?

From a brief flick through the pdf, it's got a good overview of the time period, covering important events leading up to and throughout the war. It also seems to cover more mundane things like best selling films and music of the period to add that extra bit of character.

Shadowrun Returns (briefly)

I used to religiously play Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale and Neverwinter Nights (never did finish any of them!) as well as the Fallout games(which I did finish), but switched to a console a few years back for some reason. Probably a lack of decent games on PC at the time, but buying a mac certainly didn't help either. On Friday evening I found that the Shadowrun Returns Mac client had been publicly released on Steam and it looked just like all those games I loved, so I thought I'd give it a try. What could be better than a turn based, isometric cyberpunk rpg?

Visually it's quite pretty, rendered to look like an animated painting. The details aren't crisp, but not enough to detract from things.

Unfortunately, the rest of the interface implementation feels like a throwback to the mid '90s as you're stuck in that view and the only interactions you have are to zoom in/out a teensy bit.

Story wise it's an enjoyable adventure with plenty of twists and turns to keep you guessing... but, in another retro moment, it's completely and utterly linear. About the only choices (other than the actual combat segments) that you get to make are which runners to hire and which pieces of equipment you buy. Every set piece leads directly onto the next scripted set piece, giving you no freedom to explore the world or take side missions... I think there was one point where I had two missions to choose from, but that is it. We're obviously spoilt with free roaming RPGs like Skyrim and Fallout 3 today, so I think lots of people were expecting something a little bit more flexible. 

All in all I think the adventure took about 6 hours to complete and my team only felt seriously threatened once on the default settings, so I would recommend upping the difficulty if you want a challenge. Load times between maps is also slow. At one point I assumed it had crashed and killed the game as it was still loading after about 5 minutes.

Having just moaned about it being linear, not particularly taxing and very very retro with some load time issues... I still really enjoyed it and would recommend it to others as not only do you get a fun little story, but it comes with an editor and what looks to be quite an active community as there are a number of additional adventures complete with more in the works. There is also another official adventure coming sometime in January to look forward to.

It has made me want to go back and play all the old D&D games again (if I can get them to work on my mac!)... so retro is obviously a good thing ;)

Who will be... King Of Tokyo?

That will apparently be me!

Our occasional boardgame group got together again on Monday after what felt like a fairly long hiatus. Rather than fighting off the plague infested hordes of undead, we decided we would go and stomp on Tokyo instead.

Enter King of Tokyo!

This is a fairly simple dice game, with the addition of some very basic board game elements. Each player starts off with their monster and a score board*. The aim is to either kill all your opponents, or score 20 victory points through various means. Each turn you take it in turn to roll the 6 black dice and do whatever it says on the faces. You can re-roll up to three times, holding back symbols that you want to keep in order to get the most effective combo for that turn.

There are (unsurprisingly) 6 symbols that are either Attack, Heal, Power up or victory points (1, 2 or 3). Each Attack symbol causes 1 damage to whoever is currently in Tokyo (or everyone else if you are in Tokyo). Heal repairs one point of damage if you are not currently King of Tokyo and Power Up grants you little crystals that can be spent on the upgrade cards. To gain victory points via the dice you need to have rolled three or more of the same number.

Those are basically the rules in a nutshell. I'm sure some people would play this strategically; plotting the downfall of each others creatures, but we have a 13 year old in our group which throws out any strategy as he's all out attack, even when down to 1 wound. Unsurprisingly, this disrupts everyone's plans and makes the game far more fun. We are notoriously slow when it comes to playing games, but even we managed to get through 4 games in 2 hours.

If you get the chance, I can highly recommend this game, especially for larger groups. It suggests that it's possible to play with 2 people, but I can only imagine that it's rather dull as there's no backstabbing and banter between those players not in Tokyo.


 * In the base game the creature doesn't matter which creature you are, but in the expansion there are specific mutations for each creature.

Building Wargame Terrain

As you may have noticed, I'm a little short on terrain to make photos interesting. Unlike the lightbox, this isn't because I've packed it all... I just don't own any. I know, right? What sort of person doesn't own terrain?! I've built some terrain in the past, but not since I was a weekend slave at GW back in '96(ish)... which seems like an absolute age ago.

Once we're in the new house, this is one of the things I intend to fix fairly sharpish. In preparation for this I've bought Tony Harwood's book [url=http://dampfpanzerwagon.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/building-wargame-terrain-by-tony-harwood.html]Building Wargame Terrain[/url]. I've been reading Tony's site for a while and thought the book would be as good a starting point to reacquaint myself with it all.

Anyway, the book arrived exceedingly promptly, nicely wrapped and boxed. I've not had the chance to read it all yet, but the first few chapters will certainly be useful with walls, fences and trees covered in great detail. The chatty writing style, combined with the large number of clear photos makes for an easy read that will hopefully be as easy to follow when it comes to actually constructing some of these things.

While the buildings towards the end of the book are unlikely to be things I'll build, the lessons will certainly be useful as I try to fumble through building more interactive buildings. As has been pointed out in other reviews, it is just as much an inspirational book than a straight forward guide as you're shown the evolution of techniques and plans as each model progresses. Well worth buying if you get the chance. Given that I've got book number 75/100, I'd hurry if I were you :)