Just as a followup to the post on Blood Bowl, I want to offer my thanks to John Cleese for clarifying things for the American Football crowd.

It really isn’t that difficult.

So I paid the stupid amount (£40!) for the early digital distribution of the Blood Bowl game. I had to. I’m impatient and was incredibly excited for this game. You knew this, we’ve already talked about this. You see, I know Blood Bowl. I love Blood Bowl. I’ve long been a fan and player of the board game on which the new videogame is based. The board game is a mix of American Football (even though in American ‘Football’ you use your hands for some reason. I think you’ll find we have the true football) and the miniature wargame, Warhammer. The game is also set in the Warhammer world, albeit a more comic interpretation.

It’s probably the best game that Games Workshop has ever produced and it most definitely my favourite. There are a wide selection of teams available and i tend towards the Orcs. I’m not going to post a picture of my Orc team, as I’ve been using the same one for many years and the paint job is a bit crappy. I’m halfway through painting up some Lizardmen and have recently purchased a themed Human team from a different manufacturer. I wanted something a little different, so I got myself a team of Nuns from a small Australian company.

You may have gathered by all this babbling that my expectations from this digital interpretation of my true (gaming) love would be rather high. Would the game offer a faithful translation of the classic board game? Would it allow me to relive the tabletop experience with geek friends who consider tabletop wargaming one nerdy step too far? Would it work?

No.

Now, I should qualify this. Read the rest of this entry »

So last night I was flipping through some game websites (after seeing the cinematic abortion that is the second Transformers film) and keeping an eye on Tweetdeck. I know I’m not the first person to link the two and start doing 140-character reviews, but hey, it’ll be a bit of fun.

So yeah, the account is 140Gamer and there’s a page up on Hit Somebody with a feed. I’ll add a couple bits and bobs to the page eventually, but not until I really get going and have a fair stack of reviews posted. They won’t all be new games either, I do see value in reviewing older games, especially with the renewed interest in Retro gaming caused by the each console’s digital distribution services and their repackaging of old games.

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Now playing: Jonas Tunander – Final Fantasy IX – Vamo’ alla flamenco
via FoxyTunes

I envy movie stars for their money, legions of fans, harems of hotties and excellent dental plans, but I do not envy the attention of the paparazzi. At least Selma Blair knows how to deal with them:

I don’t think I’d be as good with them

I’m a big fan of BBC Radio 4’s The Now Show, a comedy/current affairs show. If you’re in the UK, you can catch it on the iPlayer. Otherwise you can catch it and the also-excellent The News Quiz repackaged as the Friday Night Comedy Podcast from BBC Radio 4.

An important part of The Now Show are the musical stylings of Mr. Mitch Benn who, every episode, sings a new sog based on the news ofte week or other observations. For example, on hearing that the government would provide funding to teach children about topics such as blogging and Twitter (of which Mr. Benn is the King) Benn sang:

Another song I enjoyed was his comparison between the pre-crash economy and a toddler taking their first tentative steps:

In response to the X-Factor winner (I really don’t care enough to go find out her name. I doubt many remember it by now anyway) recording a new (abysmal) version of Hallelujah, Mr. Benn warned all would-be butchers to stay away from this song:

The entire show is excellent, but these songs stand out as a highlight and are something to look forward to in each episode and I’m eager to go and find some more stuff from Mitch Benn beyond this.

I’ve never really understood the outrage that arises in gamers when they believe someone is actively trying to sell them something. I’m talking about product placement, the practice of inserting images of a product into a game with the intention of drawing attention to the brand. It’s not new, but it’s surprisingly uncommon in games and even more shockingly unpopular.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t really like adverts either. I don’t sit down in front of my 360 and wonder what brand of toilet paper Big Daddies prefer, or ponder the carbonated beverage of choice for the discerning Jedi Knight. But I recognise that it’s increasingly difficult for companies, specifically those sinking huge budgets into their game, to turn a profit and that allowing Nestlé to stick a couple of chocolate bars into the in-game stores and billboards represents an attractive source of funding. Hell, let’s not forget the Cool Spot games, the protagonist of which was actually part of the 7-Up logo!

Folks, it doesn’t get much more blatant than this! Regardless of the blatant commercialism, however, I thought the game was a pretty decent platformer. Oh sure, it dated a lot quicker than Mario or Sonic but, for the time, it was a good game.

Squaresoft (as it was known at the time) also dipped their toe into the advertising pool, allowing the characters of Final Fantasy IX to endorse Coca Cola in Japan:

Granted, this was not an in-game product placement, but it was a well-established, respected development house and publisher allowing proprietary characters to be used to promote another company’s product. This was clearly a golden opportunity for Squaresoft, to use their popular characters to earn themselves a hefty (I hope) chunk of Coca Cola’s vast advertising budget. Does this dilute the Final Fantasy brand? I doubt it, but I daresay it helped pay for the development of later titles in the series.

Other games have employed limited product placement. Some subtle, some less so. One interesting example was that of Theme Hospital. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the first time in a long time I’ve been really excited to get my hands on a new game. I’m currently in the process of downloading Blood Bowl and, man, I can’t wait to give it a spin!

I’ve been really looking forward to this game, based manly on my love and adoration for the board game itself. I’ve long been a Games Workshop fan and really need to find the time and motivation to paint up my Nun team.

Anyways, download almost finished! Woot!

Last night I started posting blog posts on Destructoid, a rather impressive videogame blogging community. I got a warm welcome from commenters and added to a community-produced recap of good posts. That was nice

My first post was on designing TTMon, a copy of which is available in this blog. I also, this morning, posted a short guide on implementing random headers in blogs, based on the experience I described in this post.

I’m looking forward to getting more involved in the DToid community and have been really encouraged by my welcome.

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Now playing: Seu Jorge – Life On Mars?
via FoxyTunes

This entry was inspired by an excellent article by Bulletmagnet in which he discusses the community that built up around the TripleTriadX.com site several years ago. He also explains that his own role in the community was primarily as a card maker.

I shared a similar experience in the same community. I too took an early interest in cardmaking. My very first pieces were saved as some proprietary format used by Microsoft’s now-defunct Picture-It Express. I would upload these bloated files and wonder to myself why they refused to show up online. Yup, I was an idiot, I know. The early stuff is long-lost to the ether, so I can’t show you any truly cringe-worthy stuff. I did manage to find some older, quite bad pieces, however:

Blurry, badly cut, badly positioned, slightly dodgy number placement, low image quality and the old, slightly wonky and unbalanced templates. Not actually that bad for the time they were made, but still, we’ve come a long way baby!

It didn’t take all that long for someone to redo the templates to clean up the wonky balance, grainy backgrounds and very rough numbers. They were then redone again several years later by a player with the username, Stoicism. his latest revamp is, in my opinion, the perfect interpretation of the classic FFVIII set, cleaning up our previous versions and giving up clearer, sharper templates for our cards. Here are a few later examples of my cards:

Now, as wonderful as the classic templates are, people began to get more adventurous, adapting and theming the templates and often going so far as to create their own from scratch. Some were very interesting, but most were just small changes to the existing templates. These adapted templates were often the worst and I decided that for my own attempts, I’d try to make then from scratch. It couldn’t be that difficult, could it? Read the rest of this entry »

I recently watched series 5 of BBC sitcom, Ideal, on the iPlayer and was very impressed. I tracked down the DVDs for series 1 to 4 and have watched them all over the past week.

The series revolves around Vegas’ character, smalltime drug dealer Mos and his friends and customers. The entire series takes place within 3 flats on one floor of his building an in the stairwell of this building. Many of the characters are involved in petty or lower level organised crime. Amongst these characters, my favourite is probably Psycho Paul, leader of a small gang who often takes over Mos’ flat for use in his criminal plans.

In anticipation of series 4, a trailer was released featuring Psycho Paul training his gang for war against the local Triad:

The show is often laugh-out-loud funny with an often sinister twist, especially with the introduction of crazed priest, Fist. I would recommend the show to anyone and everyone and reassure any who are hesitant about the drug themes that the drugs are treated more as a backdrop, a reason for the characters to be where they are. The show does not push the pro-drug agenda some people seem to attribute to it.