Oh hell yes.

I’ve been doing a little bit of freelance writing for Skorched Urf’ Studios lately. Specifically, I wrote Synthetic Lycanthropy for them, and I contributed to the AAP/CPR Medkit. The links are also on my resume, and I’ve got a fantasy prestige class coming out through them soon.

I’ve decided that I’ll participate in NaNoWriMo this year (I can’t remember if I’ve already posted about this or not). At any rate, I just posted my first post on the official forums, in which I introduce myself and give a brief outline of what I plan to do during said writing month. Care to take a look?

Rant 1
I’ve been having strong feelings of ambivalence toward Apple for a little while now. Not too long ago, I went out and picked up an iPod Nano, which I love. It’s sleek, and seems pretty durable, and it does exactly what I want it to do. What I didn’t realize when I got it was that it was a second generation iPod Nano, which makes a difference. Functionally, I’d imagine the two generations are pretty similar. However, the form of the second generation Nano is slightly different from that of the first generation, which poses an interesting problem: incompatiblity with previous generation accessories. Want to use your old Nano hard case? Too bad; the second generation’s curves are slightly different, meaning that it just won’t fit unless you’re using a soft skin (and even that is an imperfect fit, in my experience). Today, I went out to pick up an FM transmitter specifically designed for the Nano. Unfortunately, the second generation Nano’s USB dock port is both larger and differently positioned, meaning that the transmitter just wouldn’t fit it. To me, this is extraordinarily frustrating, mainly because a lot of this stuff either isn’t out for the second generation yet, or is still too expensive to be worth it. The design change seems to me to be motivated almost entirely by a desire on Apple’s part to sell more peripherals, rather than allow people to use their old ones.

Rant 2
And speaking of Apple, you know how iTunes limits the number of computers you can play your legally downloaded music on? Yeah, that pisses me off, too. This is clearly an anti-piracy measure, and it sucks for two reasons. First: it punishes people who buy the music legally from iTunes. I’ve gone through a couple of computers in the last year, and two more upgrades down the road I’ll have to re-purchase all that music (in theory, at least). And that brings me to the second reason that this feature sucks: it’s laughably easy to circumvent. All you really have to do is burn that music to a CD, then rip it back off in a format that isn’t protected. So, in short, they’ve designed an anti-piracy measure that only hurts legitimate users, will not seriously impact actual music pirates, and forces me to–in effect–pirate music that I’ve already legally downloaded in order to keep using a few years down the road. Seriously, that sucks, Apple. And this isn’t just a problem with Apple; it’s a problem with anti-piracy at large. In general, it doesn’t work. The pirates will find a way to break any countermeasures you throw at them, and the people that wind up suffering are the legitimate users. It may even drive some legitimate users to download their programs illegally, sans copy protection, effectively creating more piracy. Anti-piracy is actually one of the reasons that I generally prefer playing board games and RPGs to computer games: at least I don’t have to buy two copies of Runebound in order to play with my friends. But if I want to play a quick multiplayer game of Neverwinter Nights with my wife, I need two copies? Say it with me, people: that sucks.

Generally, I’m a big fan of Mike Mearls. After all, this is the guy who designed Iron Heroes, which is probably my favorite example of the d20 System to date. However, I don’t particularly agree with this. The whole post not only seems both preachy and whiny, but ultimately an exercize in futility. It drives me nuts when people compare different forms of entertainment media, lementing why one can’t be more like the other. Why can’t video games be more like paper and pencil RPGs? They could be, if each copy of every game came with a live GM dedicated to the buyer, or an AI more advanced than anything seen in games these days (or likely to be seen in games for a long, long time). Why would most of the player-driven segments of a video game be cut out of the movie version? Seriously? Say they made a movie based off of the Thief games. Do you really want to see three hours of Garret hiding from the guards? Wouldn’t you rather have some story in there? At any rate, the bottom line is that designers use cutscenes because you simply can’t make a video game as wide-open as an RPG. To try is to doom a game to never be released. Wake me up when it’s a perfect world; I’m still waiting for my flying cars and robot butlers.

[Edit: Mr. Mearls has already posted a comment to the above tirade. It can't be more than thirty minutes after I posted it. Pretty cool; color me starstruck.]

I just stumbled onto something called The Framework. It’s effectively an RPG sub-system (or perhaps meta-system) that can be wrapped around just about any traditional RPG, which allows for a sort of fluid, pseudo-GM-less way of playing. It allows players to take turns as the GM and as PCs, or even as supporting players if they have neither role during a particular scene. It would take a group with a high level of comfort with both each other and with the system being used to pull it off, but it might make for an intersting game. I shall have to keep it in mind.

HeroCard: Rise of the Shogun, by TableStar Games, shares some similarities with other HeroCard titles. Like Galaxy and Champion of New Olympia, Rise of the Shogun uses the core HeroCard conflict mechanics to handle all player-versus-player conflicts in the game. Also like the other games, Rise of the Shogun is both a card game and a board game, as you can play the core card-battle game as a stand-alone game, separate from the board game. This review will focus on the board game portion of the game, as I’ve already covered the core card game in a previous review.

The HeroCard: Rise of the Shogun Board Game
Rise of the Shogun pits the players as representatives of their houses, each of which is trying to vie for control of a mythical version of feudal Japan. Each player is trying to become Japan’s first shogun by accumulating enough influence across the land. The game does this by making you build chains of peasants, as well as court various castles dotting the landscape in order to sway lords to your cause. On any given turn, you can court a castle, search a shrine for treasure, complete a quest (thus winning a lord to your cause), recruit more peasants, convert or capture enemy peasants, summon monsters, or attack other heroes on the board. There’s usually quite a lot to do on your turn, and you have to make some difficult decisions as to what you want to do when. The game ends when one of the player gains a predetermined number of victory points, thus becoming shogun.

A few things are of note in regards to the rules. First, peasants are at once one of your greatest assets and one of your biggest vulnerabilities. Peasants can become lords, which are worth victory points, and can be used to create trade routes between friendly castles (also worth victory points). The problem is that, if an enemy captures one of your peasants, that’s worth a victory point for him; in addition, any peasants no longer connected by a chain to a castle as a result of the capture are also captures, leading to some huge risks for long chains with only one anchor. Even worse, each player only gets fifteen peasants, and the only way to get peasants back from an enemy is to trade away your own prisoners, which are worth victory points to you.

Rise of the Shogun comes with two heroes, and two more are available as expansion decks. The Samurai is probably the most basic and easiest to play, with lots of straightforward attacks and blocks and only a few special abilities. The Ninja has a lot of cards that give him an advantage while also attacking or blocking (usually by drawing cards or forcing the enemy to discard), and has the only card that I’ve seen that allows you to exceed your seven-card hand limit, even if it’s only until the beginning of your next turn. The Miko has a lot of special abilities that allow her to ignore or negate her opponents’ abilities, and is the only hero that can attack and perform another exclusive action in the same turn. The Prince (my favorite of the four) has a number of very devastating combos and tricky, underhanded moves, but is probably the most difficult to use of the four.

Opinions
I like this game a lot. In fact, it may be my favorite of the three HeroCard games that I’ve played. It’s got a good amount of strategic depth, and I’m a big fan of the mythic Japan theme in general. The heroes, too, are all great, both mechanically and in terms of flavor. Further, the game’s got plastic pieces like you wouldn’t believe for a $25 game. The core game comes with two hero pawns (the Samurai and Ninja), eight castles, four shrines, and sixty peasants (the peasants for the expansions come with the core game), and each expansion has its associated hero pawn. All told, that’s seventy-six plastic pieces, none of which have to be punched out or assembled in any way.

One of my favorite things about the game, though, has to be the artwork. Rise of the Shogun uses this sort of faux-Japanese style remeniscent of a woodblock print, but with elements of a comic book mixed in. This combines to create a pulp-Japanese style that is really incredibly appealing and evocative. The graphic design, too, is fantastic, as all of the cards and the board are truly beautiful.

What I Liked
Almost everything. The artwork and graphic design, the game mechanics, the flavor and setting; it’s all great stuff. Add that to the fact that it really as a very fun game for two to four players, with mechinics that are fairly easy to learn.

What I Didn’t Like
Not much. About the only thing I can think of is the fact that the game has the occasional typo on a card or in the manual, and there are a couple of vague points in the mechanics (like, what happens when your hero is defeated in battle but you have no castles left?), but it’s all pretty easy to overlook.

The Bottome Line
Highly recommended. If you’re going to buy one of the HeroCard games, buy this one; it’s worth it. It’s also great value for money; you can buy the game and both expansions for about $36 on Funagain.

Um, yeah. You’ve convinced me that I no longer want the Wii, simply because it has a thin sensor bar that is no uglier than my TV, with a cord that I can easily hide behind my entertainment stand. Can we report some real news, please?

[Edit: That's more like it, Gizmodo. Me wantee.]

[Edit: Here's another one. The comments below the actual article reflect my thoughts: who's going to be playing video games in a sun-drenched room? You're not going to be able to see the images on the TV, let alone where your Wiimote is pointing. It sort of seems like someon's got an agenda over at Gizmodo. Work for Sony, maybe?]

I just got a package from TableStar Games: a review copy of HeroCard: Rise of the Shogun, as well as the Prince and Miko expansion packs. So far, I’m pretty impressed with the artwork and graphic design, and there’s lots of great little plastic pieces to play with. I can’t wait to try it out.

I’ve only played this game once, so I’m not going to do a full review. I will, however, elucidate my impressions of the game, based on a single play-through. See, I got this game as a birthday present for a friend of mine, so I don’t actually own it. However, the birthday boy and a couple of other friends of mine came over the other night and we all played Runebound together, so I did at least get to play it once.

First things first: Runebound is a long game. Actually, that’s not quite accurate. To call Runebound a long game is like saying that rain is a little damp: it’s technically true, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. The game’s box pronounces that the game takes between two and four hours to play, which in and of itself makes the game seem pretty long. However, this statement is, at best, a very conservative estimate and, at worst, a bold-faced lie. When we played the other night, we started at 3:30pm; the game ended around 11:30pm. Yes, the game lasted eight hours. Granted, this was the first time we had played, so we spent some time learning the game, and there were the necessary bathroom and pizza breaks. However, at best, this would account for maybe an hour; the other seven were honest-to-goodness play time. As I said, Runebound is not merely long; it is an epic game.

Now, you might gather from the above paragraph that I consider the game’s length to be a liability; in truth, however, I don’t. None of us were really ready for the game to end when it did, and one of my friends went out and bought the game the very next day. Runebound, for those who aren’t familiar, is a fantasy adventure game that effectively takes all of the fun instant gratification from a traditional RPG (levelling up, amassing loot, fighting monsters, etc.) and distills it into board game form. Not only that, it does it really, really well. Basically, you move your character around the map, draw adventure cards, beat down monsters, gain experience, gold, and items, and spend your hard-won gold in the various towns dotting the landscape. There are adventures of various difficulties scattered around the map, so you get to scale the game’s difficulty as you increase in power. Interestingly, while the game seems like a good fit for cooperative gameplay, it’s actually an indirect-competition game. There’s not a lot of direct player interaction (though you can attack other players if you want to); you’re basically all racing to be the first to defeat the High Lord Margath, a powerful dragon whose minions are plaguing the land.

Each adventure is contained on its own card, so when you attempt an adventure, you never really know what you’re going to be going up against. The cool thing is that there’s a sort of backstory that progresses as you play, and when certain bad guys come out, you recognize their names and it’s kind of a big deal when you defeat them.

At any rate, my impressions of the game are pretty positive. I’d definitely play it again, despite its incredible length. I’d also recommend it to anyone who’s an RPG fan.