games

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It’s been awhile since I’ve been able to enjoy any real gaming and by that I mean board games, miniatures games, what have you.  The most interaction I’ve had lately with anyone in the competitive sphere has been coinciding with the twentieth anniversary going on right now of the online role-playing Guild Wars… and I rarely get into that “player vs. player”.

No, I’m talking about actual games one-on-one in the physical world, where you and your opponent are looking at each other across the table and able to pick out each other’s nuances.

But gaming is still something I keep an eye on, if only to stay up to date on what the industry is up to.  And lately that has inordinately crossed over into the realm of true-life politics.  Enough so that it bears bringing up by your friend and humble blogger.

The tariffs that have recently been ...

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Over the years I’ve expressed my fondness for Monsterpocalypse: Privateer Press’s game of giant kaiju battling it out in cities that players put together before thrashing them to smithereens.  It’s an awesome game that has a lot of appeal and when it first came out a decade and a half ago it enjoyed quite a dedicated fan base.

Then some decisions were made.  And they weren’t necessarily for the better.  In its original iteration Monsterpocalypse was a “blind box” game that you bought a package of without knowing what was in the box.  The idea was that you could trade game pieces with others.  Some of us filled out our factions by purchasing the wanted pieces on eBay.  That in itself was sort of a fun pastime “game within the game”.  That wound up being replaced by traditional packaging that let you see what you were getting.  And then ...

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I  very rarely play video or computer games anymore.  Mostly it’s because of a lack of time.  And there are other amusements too, like having a miniature dachshund.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t have an active interest in the industry…

(I am currently trying to finish Fallout: New Vegas at last, whenever I’m having some downtime.  It’s only been out since 2010.  Time to wrap that baby up!)

There is one game franchise that is especially near and dear to my heart though: the Gears of War series.

Maybe it’s because each of the games seem to have coincided with some circumstance in my life.  Gears of  War was released on November 7th, 2006.  That was also Election Day of my first/likely last political campaign.  Then came Gears of War 2 two years later.  That game came out a few weeks after the worst thing that ever happened ...

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For a few months now I’ve debated whether or not to make this post.  I gave the company at issue a gracious amount of time to respond to the very MANY people who had taken them at their word and trusted them to produce a great product.

However it has now been almost seven months since anything in the way of official word has been published.  That should have been plenty of time to let the backers know what’s up.  Claiming that it’s been caught up in “manufacturing problems” isn’t cutting it anymore.

So it’s time for Mythic Games to level with us: Is there going to ever be a release of the Monsterpocalypse Board Game?

I’ve written before about my fondness for Monsterpocalypse: the miniatures game about giant kaiju monsters thrashing it out with one another atop a city that the players build, then demolish.  Monsterpocalypse was first ...

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Behold my new Ork big mek with kustom force field:

This is a model that I assembled three years ago, in the initial days of the COVID pandemic.  It seemed there wasn’t going to be much travel for awhile, and there were a few Warhammer 40,000 minis that I had accumulated but never gotten around to giving much attention toward.  It was as good a thing as any to occupy myself with.  I put this together and it finally dawned on me that the lockdown could last months instead of weeks.  So he just kinda lingered unpainted on a shelf.

Anyway it’s now 2023 and Warhammer 40K is hotter than ever and poised to get even bigger.  And I wanted to see if I still had my mad mini-painting skillz.  I’m rather pleased with how this little fella turned out.  So far as in-game mechanics goes, a big mek carrying ...

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Way back around 2009 or so I got into the Warhammer 40,000 miniature game hobby.  It started with the now-legendary Assault on Black Reach boxed set, which included two armies: Space Marines and Orks.  I had a lot of fun putting the miniatures together and painting them, and then played against other people at game stores in Greensboro and Burlington.  There are a lot of different factions in Warhammer 40K but I gravitated toward the Orks as my favorite.  It’s hard not to like a mob of green-skinned hooligans shootin’ and cuttin’ their way through the opposition all the while screaming “WAAAGH!”

In the years since I drifted toward other things, but Warhammer 40,000 never left my mind.  I love the setting, the lore, the beautiful miniatures, the various armies to choose from… there’s a lot of good to be said about it.  The game is over 35 years ...

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Several years go, this blogger went a little nuts over Privateer Press’s Monsterpocalypse.  The kaiju-inspired miniatures game became a staple every week at friendly local game store HyperMind.  I ended up collecting a complete army for all the factions that got released.

Then something happened: Privateer Press sold the rights to a Monsterpocalypse movie.  The project – which was to have been helmed by Tim Burton – did not get made.  And the game languished in licensing hell for several years.  And then a few years ago Privateer Press brought Monsterpocalypse back: as a “hobby game”.  The minis were no longer pre-painted, although they were somewhat larger than the original models.  By that time I wasn’t feeling up to getting into the game again, though my love of the concept was always there.

Well, call Monsterpocalypse the franchise that just won’t die, because soon there’ll be ANOTHER way ...

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A few weeks ago I found my Game Boy Advance.  Still in pristine condition after being in a really nice case all this time.  Vintage game consoles seem to be enjoying a renaissance lately, like systems that play Atari and Nintendo Entertainment System cartridges on high-def television sets.  And this particular Game Boy Advance holds a special place in my heart, it having been a gift for Christmas eighteen years ago.

I still had a bunch of cartridges on hand: Game Boy Advance ones as well as for the classic Game Boy and the Game Boy Color.  They all still work great!  Except for one small problem…

The cartridges that utilize battery backup have almost all run dry.

Battery backup in game cartridges goes back at least as far as the original The Legend of Zelda for the NES.  After choosing to save a game it would use the built-in ...

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If you’re one of the few dozen who haven’t seen Bird Box on Netflix yet, it’s about a woman leading two children to safety.  The catch is that they must remain blindfolded, or very bad things will happen to them.  Being that ours is the same culture that a year ago made a “challenge” out of eating Tide Pods laundry detergent, of course now many idiots people are making a game of doing ANYTHING blindfolded.
From tonight’s weekly gathering of our Go club:

That’s from an actual game.  I was blindfolded, Leo wasn’t.
It didn’t end well for me…
...
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One movie that has particularly stuck with me has been Pi.  Darren Aronofsky’s first film hit theaters twenty years ago this summer and fast became a sensation.  Especially among mathematicians, who for the first time had a taut psychological thriller of their very own!


A quick and dirty synopsis of Pi: Max is a math prodigy since childhood and has become obsessed with finding an ordered pattern within the stock market.  What he comes across is far bigger and has him targeted by everyone from corrupt corporate agents to Hassidic Jews (just watch it, it does make sense).  Anyhoo, there are a few scenes where Max goes to visit his old mentor Sol.  And those are some of the best-written and finest played scenes of the entire film (YouTube clip with some spoilers).  But one thing had bugged me since the first time I saw Pi…...

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