April Cheap-Ass Games

The less I spend on new games, the more money I have for cigarettes, liquor and mean women. Since April is my wife's birthday month, I guess I'll spend less on mean women in general, and more on my special mean woman who lives in my house. That means I'm playing cheap games this month, the cheapest I can find. How about free?

This month, let's start out with the cheapest game on Xbox, the first Free With Gold selection for April: Hitman Absolution. How'd I miss this series? I'd seen Hitman games on the shelves at Gamestop, but nothing about them ever really caught my attention. I guess it's the bald guy on the front, and the name. "Hitman" makes me think of Mafia, low-life thugs in 1930's Chicago whose only salutary feature is their fashion sense (hard to argue with a man wearing a sharp fedora). But I was wrong, I tell ya, dead wrong. Hitman Absolution isn't Mafia; it's Splinter Cell wearing a sharp black suit and a red tie.
The basics: you are Agent 47, a dude with a number for a name and a bitchin' spitshine hair-do. Big plot, serious plot, betrayal, redemption, good stuff. More importantly, this game pulls off the "cinematic" aspect pretty well. The voice acting is good. The plot hangs together as well as anything in Hollywood these days. But the actual gameplay is fun. You sneak. You kill dudes in interesting ways, and then hide the bodies so nobody clues in on your presence. You wear disguises and infiltrate places and, if you have patience and skill, you kill the bad guy and nobody else, clean and cool.
These mechanics actually work pretty well. The third-person, over-the-shoulder movement reminds me of Red Dead Redemption in that you can get wonky button-mashing prompts if you move too close to a target or off to the side a little, but really it's not that big a deal. You can push guards off balconies, poison a coke-head's stash, snipe from a window...it's a rail-road mission, but a sand-box as far as how you go about it.
One serious stand-out is the Contracts mode. In Contracts, you go total sand-box on one of several maps. You wander around, doing stuff, checking out the map, and mark your targets from among the random crowd, up to a total of three. Then you kill 'em, in whatever way seems bitchin'. Then you have to escape. If it turns out cool, you can save it as a Contract scenario, and it's posted online for others to play. They have to replicate your technique, from disguises worn to weapons to if anybody gets alerted to your presence. It's damned clever, in that you create missions for other people (and can play theirs), but you can only create something if you're capable of doing it yourself. You create by playing, and that's a cool twist.

I'll kill ya with this mop. I ain't proud.

Did I mention it's free for another week? You can't beat that price. Be warned, though: it's damned near 8GB, using a proprietary engine for all those pretty graphics.

Free is awesome, but I want to mention a game near and dear to my heart, one that got not much love and is now less than sixteen bucks on Amazon. It's Fuse, and it's cool, and you should buy a copy and love it.

Rag-tag and plucky.

Story-wise, it's fairly derivative stuff: the Fedrul Gubment got it's hands on alien technology, and weaponized it (of course). Now a paramilitary group has stolen it (of course). And only our plucky band of four rag-tag agents can stop them (of course). But what stands out, at least for me, are two things: first, the game takes tired concepts and does them well. Sure, the characters are nothing particularly new, but they're presented with personality and some measure of flair. Same with the story: Fuse presents a standard story, but mixes up the tropes and throws the occasional curve-ball.
Mechanically, the game is really solid. It controls much like Gears of War, and it's basically a cover-based shooter game. But the controls are fluid, the animations smooth, and it rarely feels like you're having to thread a needle to take cover (I'm looking at you, original Mass Effect).
One nice twist that Fuse brings to the table is what they call the LEAP feature. It allows you to seamlessly swap from one character to another in-game, to take advantage of each one's special abilities. You can only swap to un-used characters, so if you have a buddy playing as Izzy the medic/hacker and you need a revive, you're stuck; but, overall, it's useful and doesn't intrude.

Surprisingly, these two hotties pass the Bechdel test with ease.

Multiplayer is nice. Again, like Gears of War, Fuse goes for the Horde-mode co-op, fighting waves of bad guys. Unlike Gears, each wave has a semi-random objective that complicates matters. Boss waves come at random with a single High Value Target that has to be taken down quickly to max out bonuses. One particular objective requires you to lug a Fuse container from one end of the map to another, under heavy opposition. It's hard, and damned near suicidal unless you have friends playing with you. The AI team-mates are pretty good, overall, but not up for anything quite that demanding. Sadly, this game is old enough that the public servers are a wasteland of nobody and nothin', but you can always enlist some sucker for split-screen co-op story mode or multiplayer mode.
Sixteen bucks on Amazon, probably considerably less if you find it used at Gamestop.

That's it for now. Go play some cheap-ass games, and help show EA and Activision that we aren't slavishly running out to buy the new AAA titles the minute they're released. There's good stuff out there, underappreciated and rotting in the bins at Gamestop, just looking for a happy home.
And did I mention, cheap?

Why Any DM Not Using Google+ Groups is a Moron

No snark, no transvestite gamer-guy pictures. Not this time. Why? I know everybody loves that stuff. But not tonight. (Nope. No transvestites tonight. Except yours truly, but that's another story, and it was for a good cause.)

I just want to put out a quick bunch of links for all you die-hard geeks, the ones so indelibly marked with the geek-bug that you not only play tabletop RPG's, you make tabletop RPG's: you draw the maps and stat-out the NPC's. Yeah...you, the Dungeon Master, the Game Master, the Storyteller, whatever monicker you pick, you're that guy. Or, rather, this poor bastard:


"You Cheeto-fingered morons, that princess won't save herself."

So you're working on your story, laying out intricate plots and story hooks and detailed NPC's, knowing all the time that your players will only remember "that one time when we killed all those dudes and I got that badass sword from the old guy". It's a thankless job, hours and hours of prep work that ends in a feeling of coitus interruptus when your players totally ignore your OBVIOUS hooks and decide to go left instead of right.

Don't worry, brothers and sisters. I feel your pain. The cavalry is here:

• Maps: Did you ever waste an afternoon with a sheet of graph paper, a sharp #2 pencil, and the old 1st edition Monster Manual? Yeah, me too. I love maps. I love drawing maps. I want to draw badass maps. So I asked the wise gurus on Google+ to help. Map-Making in Games is a Google+ group full of people whose talent is only matched by their willingess to help stupid people like me. I posted a desperate plea for help, and had a page full of links within minutes. Literally minutes. If these folks can't help you, they'll quickly point you toward those who can.

• Worlds: Okay, you have your map, thanks to the badasses linked above. But what's a map if you can't provide any details. Your players want to know things like:

What's the climate like? History? Who's the king? What kind of money do they use? How much does a good hooker cost? How much does a bad hooker cost? Can I trade my +9 Holy Avenger sword for a good hooker?

 These are important questions that your players will probably want to have answered. Well, again, Google+ is the place to be:  World Building Group  This is a crowd who knows how to make shit up. Be it fiction, gaming, or just mental aerobics, damned near every post and link on this group is chock-full of hooks to get your creative gears turning.

Tordek, our quest is to find a hooker willing to service your ugly ass.
(please don't sue me, WotC)

• Last, a shameless plug for my favorite game system and favorite Google Group. I said in a recent post that Savage Worlds has ruined me on gaming, period. Lucky for me, there is a group on Google+ who feels the same way: Savage Worlds on Google Groups.

• Did I say last? No such luck, foolios. The only real way to end this list is with the group that keeps their priorities straight. If you don't spend all your money on gaming crap, that leaves more money for liquor and dwarven hookers. So, for all you drunken Dwarfophiles out there, this group is here to help:  Gaming on the Cheap. This is where you go to get the heads-up on free PDF's, good old rulesets that have gone the OGL route, tips and tricks for terrain...you name it. Be a cheap bastard and still run a kick-ass game.

Okay, dinner's ready and a cold Shiner Bock is sweating a nice condensation ring on my lame hand-drawn map, so I guess it's time to roll. Check out the links, make up cool shit, and try to not hate your players...unless your players are the Honey Boo-Boo family. Then hate 'em all you want.