Back to the Table Top, Fools.

Alright, I've been on an Xbox binge. Like I said previously, I loaded up on cheap games, and I spend all my free time playing these awesome cheap games. But all the Xboxery has been at the expense of my true love, and that's making up shit for table-top RPG games. And 2012 has seen my RPG relationships rocked to their very foundations by some serious adultery.

First some groundwork:
Back in the day, I dated a girl for many months, and she was a mixed bag. She was great when she was okay, but she was a righteous pain in the ass when she wasn't. In hindsight, her main problem is that she was All About Herself.  Then one day, I met another girl, and she was everything the other girl wasn't: she wasn't complicated, she didn't punish me for not reading her mind, and she went out of her way to make me happy. Once I got to know her, I couldn't ever (ever, ever, NEVER) go back to the first girl, even though all my friends assured me that Girl #1 was 'way hotter'. 

Here's where I tie the analogy together in a flash of brilliance:

Old and Ugly

Here's my  Bad Old Girlfriend, the standard of the industry, Dungeons & Dragons (tm). She's hot, sure, and she meets with the approval of the world at large. I can go anywhere, and somebody in the crowd at least has heard of good old D&D. That's been my go-to since 1980...love some Pathfinder, liked some Tunnels & Trolls back in the day, old school GDW Traveler was a junior high obsession...as far as I was concernced, D&D was the apotheosis of gaming.

New and Sweeeeet
 

But then I met my new honey: Savage Worlds. Better yet, let's call it SAVAGE WORLDS. It's the Linux of gaming, it's my kind and sweet new girlfriend of gaming, it's the be-all and end-all as far as I'm concerned. It's open-sourcey, in that the basic core rules are generalized. I don't mean 'generalized' like d20 was, where you had to buy a half-dozen setting specific books to play anything. I'm talking no-joke general, as in "if you have an idea, here is the basic rules framework to help you make a game of it". No joke.
I started reading it. I started buying some of the products (none of which are strictly necessary). And now I'm hooked. Hooked, I tell ya. Like Rush Limbaugh on Oxycontin, there's no looking back.

I ran an on again / off again 4th edition D&D campaign for the wife and kids. Mainly just a test bed for ideas and working out mechanics, but it was fun. Let me restate that: IT WAS FUN. But now I've gotten Savage Worlds stuck in my brain, and I can't go back to D&D. It feels restrictive. It feels burdensome. It feels like I'm wearing women's underwear, with no room for my junk.
It's a bad feeling.

Savage Worlds doesn't demand that I spend $300 bucks with every new edition. Savage Worlds doesn't tell what I can't do. Best of all, Savage Worlds doesn't tell me that she doesn't know if she really loves me, and then leaves me dangling for months, unable to committ but unable to move on with my life.

Sorry, that's called over-extending the analogy. Got stuck in the wheel-ruts of memory lane.

Upshot: Savage Worlds is cheaper than what you're playing now. Savage Worlds likes you for who you are. And Savage Worlds has an active, supportive community that really enjoys sharing ideas and news. Check Google+ for Savage Worlds, or go to Pinnacle's site. Hell, just Google it and be amazed at the love you'll receive from people who love gaming more than they love bitching about which edition is best.

Don't stay in a bitter, codependent relationship with your game. Move on, already. Savage Worlds is waiting for you, with open arms and a big plate of brownies. And beer.

                                                                 


Resolution 2013: Play Cheap (but good) Games

Like I mentioned in an earlier post, I loaded up on titles from the bargain bin at Gamestop, and had horrifying good luck. Now I'm screwed, because I not only bought the holiday glut of Big New Games, but now I have a ton of overlooked and underloved games as well. I need to take a week off of work just to wade through a few of them.
Now I won't presume to tell you what to buy...if you absolutely have to have the latest hot titles, who am I to talk you out of dropping sixty bucks? But I'm here to testify, there are a lot of good games that never got the credit they deserve, and they are all less than twenty bucks these days.

He plays D&D, too.

Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena is my dark horse darling ju dour. In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm a huge fan of Vin Diesel, and especially his Riddick movies, so I was really worried about even trying this. Movie tie-ins are almost axiomatically shitty, but this poor bastard was languishing in the remaindered rack for only eight bucks, so I figured it was worth a gamble.
Good move, that. The game play is tight, the stealth mechanics are solid, and you by God feel like Riddick when you play this game, sneaking around, dropping down on fools, and generally just kicking ass. Vin Diesel provides the voice talent, and that really adds some gravelly icing to the surprisingly good game-play cake. Sure, it can be over the top, and Riddick's surly baddassery gets a little laughable at times, but those are nitpicking complaints.



Thanks, IGN. I heart your mom.

Some game series are full of hard-core fans, and when you get hard-core fans, you always end up with a black sheep. An outcast. Unloved, just waiting for its chance to shine. So it is with the oft-overlooked Halo title, ODST.  Personally, I like Spartans just as much as the next guy. Or girl. But I've always had a soft spot for the ODST Helljumpers. For the uninitiated, Spartans are surgically enhanced super-soldier, huge badasses in the ultimate kung-fu space death armor. But the ODST are their gritty little brothers, regular guys with bad ass attitudes that take the fight to the enemy without high-tech enhancements. They drop into battle via one-man orbital drop pods, in a blatant rip from Heinlein's Starship Troopers (the awesome book, not the campy movie), and pretty much kick ass like if John Wayne starred in a Quentin Tarantino movie. And Nathan Fillion does voice work for a lead character (and serves as the character model, so it even looks like Mal Reynolds. *sigh*). Halo-roids got all butt-hurt about this one, mainly because there was no Master Chief, and it felt like a Halo 3 DLC pack rather than a stand-alone game. Fair enough. Regardless, it plays well, the story is okay (barring the weird side-story you pick up with comm messages) and you get to kill Covenant with the SMG a lot. One quirk that I truly did hate is the city of New Mombasa, Kenya. The waypoints are remarkably confusing, and you can spend a lot of time wandering around in circles, wondering where your next objective is. Try it in campaign co-op with a friend, it's cheap enough to buy two copies and still be ahead of the game.

Alright, my back hurts and we just opened the champagne (sans Dick Clark, even though he was kind of a creepy lich in his latter days). I want to go out on a limb and find some deep dirt, something most of you probably haven't even heard of: Section 8 Prejudice. It's on Xbox Live for download, cheap. Last I checked, we're talking fifteen bucks. For that price, you get a fun powered armor vs. bad guys game, a lame but playable campaign, a decent competitive mode, and a great horde-style survival mode. Fifteen bucks. Granted, nobody much is playing anymore, but you can fill in with bots. The whole gimmick of the game is this badass powered armor, and you drop in from high-altitude, near-orbit. You pick your drop zone and the animations coming in are wicked cool...then, when you land on/near an enemy and pick 'em off, it's a fine moment indeed. Controlling command posts allows you to build defenses, such as anti-air guns. That pretty much denies the enemy from being able to drop within their radius of fire. Cool strategy. Getting kills gets you points that you can use to air-drop turrets, mech armor, vehicles and other cool stuff. The game really shines with the random objectives that pop up in the middle of a match for big points: protect / kill the HVT, escort / destroy the convoy, recover / defend the junk, or (my favorite) wipe out the whole other team for big points. The 'victim' team has to avoid getting killed for two minutes, while the 'stalker' team tries to wipe them out in that same allotted time. Big fun, cheap price. This is probably the highest value of any of the games I've listed. You get a lot of shit for your fifteen bucks.

Like I said, it's after midnight, so happy New Years, and any of you Mayans out there can kiss my ass. It's 2013, despite three individual doomsday predictions in 2012 alone. Doomsayers be damned, ya'll go have fun with cheap games.

Bargain Bin Lovin'

Good Cheap Nazi-killin'...

Game Stop...damn you, Game Stop. I stopped by to pick up a WiiU game for the kid, and ended up pawing through the marked-down Xbox game bin. Five bucks for Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Athena? And what the hell is Turning Point: the Fall of Liberty? Who cares, it's only four bucks! I felt like Lindsay Lohan on Dollar Shots Night, determined to load up on everything because it's on sale! By the time I got home, I was loaded down with a bag full of three-to-eight year old games, some popular but aged, some equally aged but utterly obscure. I started off with obscure by popping in Turning Point: Fall of Liberty.   It's standard shootie-killy fun, based on an intriguing premise: what if Winston Churchill's accident in 1931 left him dead, rather than just sporting a dashing limp? According to this game, Britain goes down as fast as France, and, before you know it, the Nazis (in my best Aldo Rayne voice, pronounced nazzzeeeez)are dropping troops in the Big Apple, of all places. By God, that idea alone is worth my four bucks.
How does it play? Comparisons first: it uses the Unreal engine, so the look is familiar. Think TimeShift, Medal of Honor: Airborne, Singularity, or any of that era. Yeah, facial animations are creepy and some of the physics get a little wonky, but the engine is more than up to the job of rendering Nazis to shoot. Invisible barriers keep you from going all open-world and exploring nooks and crannies, but you aren't here to explore, are you? Hell no, you're here to defend America from goose-steppin' Nazzzzeees, dammit.
Not a ton of plot to slow things down in this game. Basically, America stays isolationist as the Axis takes over the rest of the world. Dewey defeats Truman, for real this time. By the time 1953 rolls around, the Axis has dominated everything but the contiguous 48. America is happy with its head in the proverbial sand, until...well, here's where the game comes in.
You start right off with no real lead-in: Messerschmitts are bombing New York, and paratroopers are wafting down through Manhattan. You are an ironworker, the proverbial Regular Joe working thirty stories up, and having to navigate the narrow I-beams to get down to ground level. About halfway down, you find some of your first parachuting Nazis, and it all heats up after that. The story mostly consists of joining the thrown-together resistance and killing lots of Nazis. So you're asking, "What's the point? Sounds like the same old." Maybe. Just maybe. But the game only cost me FOUR BUCKS and I got to shoot Nazis in New York, suckers! Yeah, the story is a rail-road that never does any justice to the awesome basic premise, but...did I mention it was only four dollars? Verdict (or, in this case, VERDICKTEN): BUY, but not if it's more than five bucks.