Games

Back from the EC

We’re back. Not much luck gamewise and caught a nasty flu on the road, but otherwise a great trip. Prague was nice but very touristy and starting to be pretty expensive.

Thursday: we fly in around noon, and manage to get to the hotel eventually. The hotel (Hotel Dum) proves to be a soviet-style 19-floor concrete monster of a building way in the outskirts of town. Not a dump, though, and well suited to running the EC. Us Finns quickly christened the place “Khobar Towers” after a VTES card (which was in turn named after a Saudi apartment block which got hit by a bomb in the 1980s). Some of our hosts (Karel, Martin & Martina, thanks once again guys!) have organized a city tour for us, so off we go. Prague proves to be a very pretty city absolutely crawling with tourists; we wend our way through the crowds and see the sights. The tour ends at a cellar pub where the EC welcome party is held, and the rest of the evening is spent in the company of lots of people, beer and some pickup games. Back to the hotel via metro + bus sometime before midnight.

Friday: up sometime before 9am, and then off to see if breakfast will help fight hangover. It helps, but not totally. EC registration is next. I decide to play with my Settite + Baali Mute voter – it’s not my strongest deck, but I’m already qualified so I decide to give it a try. Tuukka decides to go hardcore and shaves off most of his hair and gets into costume as a Nosferatu, eliciting lots of “wow!” comments. The rest of the day goes to playing in the Last Chance qualifiers, and my deck nets a round zero VPs – it’s not that it’s a bad deck, but it’s just too unreliable and slow in its current form. In one game I get back-ousted by Robyn, because she (quite correctly) sees me as a danger for her. All three(!) games feature Alamut on the table, a card that my current deck can’t easily handle. After the games someone (don’t remember who, sorry) suggested looking into New Management, which I thought was a great idea; lots of cards that are a danger to that deck (Ventrue HQ, Alamut, etc) can be stolen with that. Fun games, in any case, and I got some good ideas for improving my deck. I think the basic idea is sound, but making it flow properly and be dependable is a challenge. The rest of the evening goes in pickup games, with lots of usage of the friendly hotel beer tap (pint of beer for about one euro). Got to bed at around 2.30am or so.

Saturday: up again at around 9am, feeling both sleep-deprived and a bit fluish. Breakfast helps a bit, and then there’s time to rest for a while in the hotel room before the EC Day 1 tournament begins. This time I’m playing my best deck, a Toreador-antitribu + Daughters tap & bleed thing which uses Art’s Traumatic Essence a lot. Things go a bit better this time around, but only a bit – the day nets me a total of 1.5 VPs. Both of the first games were pretty tight, but in the last one I’m ousted in half an hour by a fast !Malk Kindred Spirits bleeder, did not draw into much bounce at all and that was that. The deck still needs some tweaking, maybe a bit more bleed power and definitely some more defense (bounce). Teemu also (later) suggested looking into using Blind Spot instead of Misdirection, which sounds like a good idea (though the requirement for the target to be younger or an ally may be a problem). This is one more deck that I’ll continue to try to tweak, the basic form is quite sound but it needs tweaking to make it more robust. Again some pickup games, but by evening I feel a bit too much flu coming on and I retire to sleep sometime around 1am.

Sunday: last day of the EC, and this time I wake to a full fever plus the flu. Fun fun. I borrow some tabs from Antti, and after that “better life through chemistry” operation I stagger downstairs for breakfast. The chemicals plus food helps a bit, and I decide I’m not too sick to play. The side tournament has been switched from the initially-planned team format to a normal constructed, which is declared to be the first qualifier for 2009 (lots of cheers when that was announced). I decide to use my Osebo intercept toolbox – it’s not my strongest deck, but at least it has combat and intercept, and I figure it can’t suck any worse than my other decks. Well, that proves to be correct – despite a first game in which things looked very bright for a while (and which featured four Laibon decks!) I net a grand total of one VP for the whole day. Oh well. Kudos to the Hungarian player who gave me a chance to grab a second VP just because I had helper him earlier; the attempt failed because I didn’t draw into either my Dragonbound or more bleed, but the gesture was appreciated. After the games I went to watch Taija play in the finals (of the First Chance), and then talked to various people (Robyn, LSJ, etc) before they retired to prep for their morning departure. All in all, a fun EC and I didn’t encounter any unpleasant tables or players. Maybe next year I’ll actually score better. Maybe not. We’ll see. Before we retired we grabbed some extra beer from some friendly Icelanders (thanks!) and went to play some more casual games. Sometime in the morning hours it was sleepy time once again.

Monday: most of the other Finns, and most of the other EC players in general, left in the morning. After saying our goodbyes to them, we headed towards the city, on a mission: to find ourselves a hotel room for the last night. The EC hotel was booked full, and despite our trying they had not been able (or willing) to pre-book us a room for an extra night. So off we went. Our first try at a hostel used by some other Finns got us a “ask us tomorrow” answer, so aided by advice from Lonely Planet we headed to the train station to talk to a tourist agency. That proved to be a good plan, the very friendly lady there got us a really nice hotel room in Mala Strana, within walking distance of Prague Castle. After this was done, it was time for some tourist stuff: a visit to the Mucha museum, and then some general shopping and walking about. I was feeling pretty crappy, to be honest: a combination of fever (kept sort-of in check with chemicals), sleep deprivation and beer kept me in a weird, muzzy floating state of mind. An ok day, but I was pretty wiped out when we got back to the hotel. That evening we managed to play one more pickup game with a Spanish player who (like us) was still staying at the hotel.

Tuesday: a great day, especially since my fever was gone (though I was still a bit down with the flu) and the sun was shining. We check out of Khobar Towers and make our way to Mala Strana and our new hotel. When we get there we hear that we’ll have to wait till 2pm to get our room, so we leave our bags at the hotel and head for the castle. We arrive eventually, after taking a “short-cut” that was anything but. The castle was pretty cool, though I wouldn’t rate it a must-see. The church glass paintings were quite impressive, and the whole place was worth seeing – especially since the weather was nice, and the view across the city was appropriately scenic. Back to the hotel and check in, our room proves to be really nice – the difference between this and hotel Dum, both “three star” hotels, is pretty extreme. We take in lunch at a nearby pub/restaurant which provides me with the best food I’ve had so far in Prague, a truly excellent stroganof with a side dish of green beans, bacon and garlic. Yum. With that and some good dark beer under our belts, be stagger towards the center. Janne wants to visit the Mucha museum gift shop again for a poster, and then we go see a Jan Saudek gallery – I had almost forgotten that Saudek is Czech, suddenly seeing his name on a sign made me go “hey, I must go see that!”. The show is nice, and I manage to buy two high-quality poster prints from the gift shop, yay! Saudek is a long-time favorite of mine, I really like his work. Back to the hotel, stopping for some dessert and some more beer on the way, and then it’s time to get a proper night’s sleep for once.

Wednesday: after a very classy hotel breakfast (borsch soup! different types of coffee! stuff! more stuff!) it time to catch the morning flight back home. We get to the airport via public transport without problems and the flight is one time. Pretty exhausted by the time I actually get home; it’s a hot day, I’m carrying a ton of stuff, and the flu is still wearing me down. Good to be home. The cats and wife muchly agree.

Some pics from the EC (by Petr Tarcinec) can be found here. […]

Computer kablooey, flee to Prague!

Fortunately I’ve done PC upgrades often enough to expect trouble automatically, so when I upgraded my home computer with a new motherboard, new memory and a new graphics card I wasn’t expecting a smooth ride. The cause for the upgrade was my desire for more gaming graphics power, and since my old mobo had AGP/DDR connections this seemed like a good time to also upgrade to a modern PCIe/DDR2 motherboard. So I did.

Installation went fine mechanically, though my microATX case is a bit cramped. Still, everything fit after some tweaking. When I booted up to Win XP I got what I was halfway expecting: a boot failure, due to the changed chipset etc (boot gets going, then stops and the thing reboots). So I’ll need to try and repair the rig with a Windows XP install disk in repair mode, fair enough – and if all else fails I have backups of the important stuff and can always do a clean reinstall.

Next up, boot to Linux. That failed too, complaining about failure to detect (SATA) disk. After some cursing (I was sure I had remembered to compile in the needed drivers), I discovered that the BIOS defaults to non-native SATA mode for backwards compatibility reasons. Duh. After fixing that, Linux booted fine to text mode. Hooray! X11 didn’t start up, but that was to be expected.

The next day I tried to get X to work, and finally had to revert to the base “vesa” driver – the current incarnation of the Gentoo “ati” and/or “radeonhd” drivers don’t support the 4850HD yet, and the ATI binary drivers aren’t compatible with the recently-released xorg 1.5.0 I’m running. Oh well, at least I get X/KDE via the vesa driver, it’s not like I need accelerated graphics in Linux much anyway right now.

Whle I was doing this the machine froze up a few times, which started to worry me. So I did the first thing I always do when random freezes happen: I fired up memtest86+. Lo and behold, it started showing red “memory fail” results almost at once. I tried with the memory in different slots, and with different memory timings. No go. In the end I had to concude that the memory was just plain bad. That, or there’s some wierd incompatibility with my new motherboard which should support DDR2 800 dual channel according to specs.

…so today it was back to Verkkokauppa. After explaining the situation I got a refund on the memory and grabbed a replacement 2GB from the store – this time “plain basic” DD2 667, in case it’s some motherboard bug with the 800’s or something. Tonight, if I have time, I’ll try things out again.

“If I have time” because my flight to Prague for the VTES EC tournament leaves pretty early tomorrow morning and I still have a ton of prep plus packing to do for that. Looking forward to the trip; I have three more or less tournament-ready decks with me and intend to quickly put together a few more decks for casual play. Never been to Prague before, I’m told it’s a great city though I hear varying opinions about how expensive it is nowadays. I guess it can’t be too bad since I’m coming from Helsinki, one of the most expensive cities in the world at the moment. Hell, even Paris didn’t seem bad in comparison. […]

Minireview: Tower of the Last Baron (LB1)

Now this is more like it. Not that Paizo’s “Pathfinder” adventure modules have been bad in any way up to now, quite the opposite in fact… but they have tended to be made in the D&D adventure format, with lots of combat being the core “content”. Paizo’s modules have tended to be a lot better than most others, in the sense that they have usually had stuff other than combat and the opponents have usually had motivations and such instead of just being walking clumps of exp… but still. At their core, many have boiled down to “go there, kill everything, gather the loot”, as that’s the game type D&D tends to promote.

Tower of the Last Baron (written by Stephen S. Greer) is something a bit different. Here the PCs are actually spies, attempting to infiltrate a potentially hostile town and assassinate the Baron running the town. Instead of “save the world from ancient evil”, here the motivations are a lot more realistic and down to earth – the Baron is apparently dealing with an enemy faction, and it is feared that he will help them initiate an invasion. In other words, the PCs’ “higher ups” want an inconvenient local ruler “taken care of”. That’s not something that you see in D&D every day.

In addition to the non-standard setup, the module also manages to be very well put together and interesting. There’s a big emphasis on social interaction within the town and on subterfuge; if the PCs wade in swinging their weaponry they’ll get their ass handed to them by the local militia (in all probability). Same if they carelessly blab about their mission to random strangers. The PCs have to figure out how to infiltrate the town castle, who to trust, and how to perform an assassination – if they want to follow their orders, that is. Interesting stuff.

This is probably my favorite from all the Paizo modules I’ve read so far, and that’s putting it against some tough competition. I’m actually thinking of trying out this thing with the Burning Wheel ruleset, to see how it would work. […]

Minireview: Pathfinder #11, Skeletons of Scarwall

Skeletons of Scarwall (written by Greg A. Vaughan) is the next-to-last installment in Paizo’s “Curse of the Crimson Throne” adventure path. It’s a combatfest, but for once it looks to be a good combatfest. Set almost entirely in the brooding, ancient castle of Scarwall, there is a definite air of old Ravenloft here – boosted by the all-too numerous undead that inhabit and guard the place. There are lots of nifty ideas and encounters and the whole thing reads like good fun. Assuming you’re ok with lots of combat, of course, the idea here is that the PCs need to fetch the McGuffin… err, I mean the holy weapon “Serithtial” from the depths of the castle, since it looks like that weapon is key to defeating the queen. Ancient evil that requires an ancient artifact to defeat it… we’ve seen this one before. More than a few times. Still, ignoring the cliche setup the whole module seems very well put together, so I won’t complain too much. Besides, you can always get rid of the artifact and replace it with something else – maybe just key information. As long as the PCs need to fetch something from the castle, it really does not matter much what it is. Thus, McGuffin.

The book also contains a very nice article about the (nasty) god Zon-Kuthon and its almost-as-nasty followers, and the usual fun “pathfinder journal” entry plus some new monsters. […]

Good Old Games

You know how some old computer games used to rock and probably still would, despite retro graphics and limited technical merits? And you know how hard some of those games can be to actually find nowadays, even via eBay and such? …and if you answered “sure” to both of those, you’re probably familiar with the frustration of finally getting that game (or installing an old favorite) and finding out that no, it no longer runs in Windows XP or Vista. Or if it runs, it runs at 60x speed and is totally unplayable. Or some such.

Well, the guys behind Good Old Games are trying to do something about that, and make some money on the side. They are promising a selection of classic games (including Fallout 1 & 2, Freespace 1 & 2, and so forth), tweaked to run on XP/Vista, with absolutely no DRM, and for a cheap price. Sounds a bit too good to be true… but looks like it isn’t. The site is currently in open beta test (I have an access key), and judging by my experiences so far: they are delivering what they are promising, and more besides.

I signed in to my beta account and bought a copy of the first Fallout game for $6. Download was smooth and included a bunch of extras including wallpapers and the game soundtrack in mp3 form (!). It installed without a hitch and ran perfectly (on Windows XP). I’ve never really played Fallout before, just tried it out a bit on a friend’s computer – so I’m now actually playing it for the first time. Sure, the graphics are pretty retro, but the game itself is great. I hear Fallout 2 is even better

…and since beta testers apparently get one free game as thanks, so I also got me a free copy of Fallout 2. That one also worked right “out of the box” (so to speak), and included an mp3 soundtrack etc.

I find it really hard to find anything negative to say about this new service. The games really do work, there is no crap DRM, the price is low, and the website is both stylish and has a nice and smooth user interface. Sure, the game selection now in the beginning is small, and that’s the only bad thing here – but if there is any justice in the world, this thing will take off and their catalog will expand.

Want to try it out? Head over to the site and sign up in the beta, I think they are still open. Getting both Fallout games for a total price of $6, with runs-on-XP tweaks, is a bargain. […]

Delta Green: Eyes Only available again

Quick heads up: Delta Green: Eyes Only, which previously was only available as a hardcover limited run which quickly sold out, is now available again in paperback form. Needless to say: it rocks. Seriously.

If you like Delta Green and/or modern Call of Cthulhu and don’t have this book yet, I suggest you grab a copy before they run out, once again. […]

Minireview: The Compass of Celestial Directions, Vol. IV -- The Underworld

The Underworld provides a 2nd edition update to the Underworld, where Exalted’s dead (and other creatures) “live”. The locale has already been explored to some extent in some 1st edition books and in the 2nd edition Abyssals book, but this book provides a “real” overview of things.

It’s pretty good. Lots of things were familiar to me from the 1st edition books (though having 2nd ed stats for things is always nice), but many things were new and interesting. Far from being just a generic “land of the dead”, the Shadowlands in Exalted have a very specific history and “cosmology”. Like Exalted’s “heaven”, Yu-Shan, the Underworld is far from generic. The place acts as a dark mirror to Creation, in many respects, also mirroring the vast complexity and regional variance.

We get stats for many NPCs, some of which are very high power. You do not want to mess with the Green Lady, in case that wasn’t blindingly obvious. You also do not want to mess with the Deathlords without lots of prep – their stats and capabilities are elevated to a much more suitable level from the joke stats in the 2nd edition core, where Mask of Winters didn’t look too scary. These new stats for the Deathlords make destroying them seriously difficult… which is the whole point, they should never be pushovers, even to a group of experienced Solars. Especially considering what the Deathlords originally were…

Together with the new Abyssals book, you now have the tools to run a Shadowlands game if you wish. You also get lots of great toys and flavor to throw at your Solar players, in the more likely game scenario. Of course, Creation is vast and so are the Shadowlands; one book can’t hope to give anything but a brief overview. In that, this book succeeds well – lots of story hooks, local flavor, and ideas. While not quite as cool a read as the Yu-Shan book (perhaps because much of this material was familiar to me from the 1st edition), this is still an extremely solid supplement. […]

Minireview: A Dirty World

Ok, so on to A Dirty World, which is Greg Stolze’s new “film noir” standalone roleplaying game. As I mentioned eariler, I was lucky enough to play in a demo run by Greg at Ropecon and I had a blast. The game really seemed to promote the “feel” of film noir, though of course part of that credit goes to the very nice demo scenario we were playing, and to Greg’s quite excellent GM skills.

It’s a small, compact game engine, based on the ORE engine (as seen in Nemesis, Wild Talents, Reign, etc) – though this incarnation has been tweaked heavily in the “Forge” direction. In a good way, I think. The stat/ability design is quite clever, and the game has your stats changing every scene – the player characters get challenged and change all the time. A “femme fatale” character might begin her slow climb from corruption to purity – or become even more corrupt with every scene. It’s up to the player, and dependant on how the character acts in the scene. As befits the genre, going towards the “bad” direction is much easier than “good”, generally. This mechanism rocks, since “noir” tends to feature people confronted with difficult choices and being forced to compromise, and then to live with the results of those choices. The ruleset is extremely abstract and combat is handled in the same way as any other test in the game. For some games this might be a problem but here it seems to work wonders, since in the noir genre social skills (and attacks & backstabs) are at least as common and deadly as are flying bullets.

The book includes a “random noir plot generator”, in the style of the random one-roll generators found in Reign. It’s very cool, and gives you a basic story framework to build on. Greg also includes a couple of nice examples of how to build a story with it.

All in all, this is an excellent, modern “indie” roleplaying game that is tightly focused on one genre and one type of story theme. It also shows how versatile the core ORE framework is. Recommended. […]

Minireview: Southern Vehicles Compendium One, Gears & Striders: Shields of Honor

This book is pretty much what it says: a compendium of South gear and strider designs for the Heavy Gear roleplaying game. It gathers together designs from a couple of earlier books into a one-book reference.

Not much to say here, really. The gear writeups are mostly quite interesting, since they contain lots of game flavor (“this gear was popular with pilots due to X but was hard to get because of part Y shortages due to factor Z”) and aren’t just lists of technical data. I would have liked to see more side and back profiles of the gears – in most cases we’re only given a front view – but that’s a fairly minor complaint. This is a solid reference book into South gear designs and you’ll probably want this (or one of the later vehicle compendiums) if you’re running a South-based HG game. It’s also probably a fun addition to the bookshelf for people only playing the Blitz miniatures game, it gives a lot of history and background on the gears that’s (understandably) missing from the miniatures rulebook. […]