Category: Review

Last weekend we picked up Mario Kart for the Wii for a fiver after trading in two games that we neither liked nor played (Wabbit Wampage? Cars?) and I must say it was the best fun I’ve had since I bought the device (over a year ago) and discovered Wii Sports.

The game isn’t as ‘fast’ or ‘frenetic’ as playing the game in the Arcades (which was also a lot blurrier and more confusing) but it’s hard to beat for playability especially when the other racers are friends of yours (or friends of friends).

In addition to the single player ‘Win the Cups, unlock the racers’ game, you can have up to 4 players on one Wii (as long as you have enough controllers) and you can also play on the WFC network getting up to 8 human racers either from your friends list (requiring the sharing of a Kart friend code) or playing against the multitudes of people out there in the real world.

Races, battles and coin collecting games were all good fun. I’d played half a dozen games at the weekend which meant I wasn’t totally unprepared for the game and Paul showed me some tricks (like the jump boosts, firing backwards etc) while we waited for Lee to plug his Wii into his projector at home. Once in, selection of games was very easy and there was little or no latency in the service.

Last night I hooked up with Paul, Lee and Tanya to play Wii Karting. Lee and Tanya were at home in London on Lee’s Wii showing that two people can play online from one Wii. Two people or more playing on one 32″ TV is not the best experience and can be somewhat confusing so I applaud Lee’s idea of hooking up to a projector. It would make a difference. Paul and I were online from home – him in Mallusk, me in Bangor.

The ‘signpost’ communication method isn’t the best however with only a limited number of phrases available so it’s not taking advantage of the social vibe that the ‘Mii’ avatars could provide. Maybe at some point in the future they’ll provide voice chat but that’s in the future and not right now. I’m told tales that some enterprising folk are using their XBox systems as voice chat relays so they can play Mario Kart and laugh at each other. We were all Mac people so we fired up iChat (voice) and regaled each other with insults and guffaws as we dumped turtle shells, bombs and banana skins on the other racers. I reckon Skype voice would work just as well.

As for racing itself – it seems slow when watching someone playing but it gets very quick when in the race and you know you’re half a lap behind and every corner counts. The game balance is helped by the use of “weapons” like the banana skins I mentioned and homing turtle shells and other methods of wiping out other people. Every time you get hit, or stunned, or squashed or shrunken it slows you down and the sound effects are excellent.

The tracks also, range from odd to excellent and in fact none of them are bad in any way. There’s a lot of colour and some people may feel seasick with it (luckily I don’t suffer from that), there’s enough variety and obstacles to keep it from being a dry race and it seems to push the Wii in terms of what it is capable of.

Is it worth getting the wheel? I don’t know. I’ve played it with the wheel and with a third party half wheel and I think that it might be worthwhile not getting the wheel unless you want the whole experience.

All in all, it’s an excellent game and my interest in it is magnified by the potential for playing online against friends.

The alternative ending to “I am Legend” was posted on FirstShowing.net.

Ironically, it restores the meaning of I Am Legend though Neville’s ending is different.

It would have made a better movie ending for sure.

I’ve read the book and watched both Omega Man and the recent Will Smith adaptation. I am looking forward to the March 18th release of the DVD, if only for the alternative ending.

Both deviate from the novel wildly but the later adaptation actually annoys me more. In the epilogue narration, the words “and this is his legend” are used which implies that “I Am Legend” refers to Will Smith’s last minute finding of the cure.

Wikipedia sets the story straight.

as he dies he reflects on how the new society regards him as a monster. Just as vampires were regarded as legendary monsters that preyed on the vulnerable humans in their beds, Neville has become a mythical figure that kills both vampires and the still-living while they are sleeping. He becomes a legend as the vampires once were, hence the title.

See? That’s about a million times more poignant than Will Smith clutching a grenade and the hit and miss massacre that can cause.

Good movie? I’d have to say yes.

I think it has everything to do with being a parent.

I’ve never been a fan of Godzilla movies but I do like action/horror/disaster movies as a whole. Cloverfield is excellently executed and it left my head filled with “what would I do” thoughts (which all good horror/disaster movies do). As a parent you worry about more than just yourself and that’s what M. Night Shyamalan touched on with Signs. When you’re a parent, it’s more than just you in the horror.

The presentation of camcorder footage worked for Blair Witch and, to be honest, works even better for Cloverfield though the cameraman obviously has some sort of disorder because most people would ditch the camera early on. Even if recording it from the point of view of seeing “how it all went down”.

I can’t tell you much about the content itself without introducing too many spoilers. The shaky handheld footage does get irritating at times when you just want to get a bloody good look at something.

To be honest, if you’re old enough, go and see this movie. I don’t know if it needs to be seen in a cinema at all – I’m pretty hacked off with the bullshit about the “cinema experience”. Watching cinema in Northern Ireland consists of listening to slightly muffled sound, watching a screen that proudly displays the human detritus of heavy petting sessions in the projection room and listening to the beeps of mobile phones, the rustling of packets, the slurping of smoothies, having to uproot yourself because some idiot can’t get to his seat “from the other side” and sitting in a seat that is solely designed to stop you falling asleep.

Despite all of that, Cloverfield is a great film. It makes me shiver in anticipation for J.J.Abrams version of Star Trek (now delayed for a Summer 2009 release) and look forward to a possible sequel to Cloverfield.

Interestingly, most people don’t stay to the end of the credits. They miss out.

From IMDB:

A genetic anomaly allows a young man to teleport himself anywhere. He discovers this gift has existed for centuries and finds himself in a war that has been raging for thousands of years between “Jumpers” and those who have sworn to kill them.

I enjoyed this movie. Hayden Christensen was pretty good though I think they could have kept Max Thieriot as the protagonist even though it might have made the film either more kiddie-friendly or perhaps more dark, who knows.

There were a lot of loose ends, lots of things that went unexplained – like how this is all a secret when there are 5 year olds teleporting around – Marvel went with the puberty thing because, let’s face it, teens undergoing puberty are already alienated from society.

One tiresome detail though was the war that has been raging for centuries. Of course, now Jumpers are the REAL reason for the Crusades, the witch hunts, the burning of the Warsaw Ghetto, the reason for concentration camps, Stalin’s purges, the fall of the Romanov dynasty and the Great Fire of London. I’m exaggerating here but if you ignore the “paladins” thing and just assume they’re just the next logical extension of HomeLand Security, things go a lot better.

The real “deal killer” for me was sadly Samuel L. Jackson. He’s gone the way of Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Robert de Niro and every other Hollywood actor who now completely believes his own hype. Apart from the ridiculous hair dye job, he’s a crazy insane preacher who uses a signature hunting knife to viscerally gut people. And this is a 12A? Load of bollocks really. They should have made more use of Diane Lane rather than a few cameo pieces. I think she’d make an excellent head honcho and an even better foil for our hero.

That said, deal-killer or not, it’s not a bad film. I think they have expended a lot of their juice in the first film and if it were me I’d already have Jumper 2 ready for casting.

I recently read James Herbert’s ’48 which is a post-World War II version of a few post-apocalyptic stories. It was essentially “28 Days Later” or “Night of the Comet” but with Nazis. It read like a muh shorter ‘lite’ version of Stephen King’s “The Stand”. It’s Dawn of the Dead with a swastika.

Sure – there’s some good plot points, some not so good and some decent characterisation. It leaves the ending a little flat but it’s an easy read and not a long book so most people should be able to find their way through it easily enough. Two sex scenes, both where the author gingerly describes genitalia without using real words. Some interesting characters were killed off and the hero – well – I found it very hard to identify with him and his constant internal monologue.

So is this a mashup like we find in so many online apps and also in roleplaying games? Who knows. I liked the book, enough to finish it which hasn’t happened with every book I’ve bought in the last few years.

Along the lines of rehashing plots, new movie The Invasion seems to be just a rendition of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Everything old is new again…

I was doing my six-monthly browse through the stacks at Replay in Bangor and as usual found myself not wanting to leave without parting with some cash. It wasn’t due to the intrusion of the proprietor who helpfully inquired if there was something he could help me with (wow, it was kinda irritating), but because I like to support my local game store. The plight of game stores is legend.

So this is why I find myself with a copy of the main book from White Wolf’s latest line: Scion

Scion Hero is about people finding out they are the sons and daughters of gods long past. To their credit they include a good description of the pantheons they think would be fashionable (Norse, Japanese, Aztec, Egyptian, Voodoo, Greek) and if the company’s past is anything to go by there will be new pantheon splatbooks out in the next few months as well as some net-pantheons created by rabid fans.

It’s not a bad book, ideal for the generation of low powered heroes along the lines of Hercules, Perseus and other offspring of the gods. Of course I’ll never get around to playing it having neither the players nor the GMs available even though it’s a low level superhero game.

Scion Hero is the first of a series of books which continues in June this year with Scion DemiGod which will be covering the more powerful scions – I suppose it might be the equivalent of the D&D Expert or Master set if Scion Hero is to be considered the Basic set.

I’m not mad struck on the layout but then this is the first WW game I’ve bought in a long time. The art ranges from very good to “uh, what is that meant to be” which isn’t to say any of it is bad.

It’s a lot of fun to read too.

The Guardian has a book review on De viribus quantitatis (On the Powers of Numbers) penned by Luca Paciola, a man who was a personal friend of Leonardo da Vinci and who is considered not only the father of modern (double entry) accounting but also one of the leaders in magic tricks. The book covers mathematical puzzles, tricks, proverbs and verses and codes.

Don’t try this at home…

For washing your hands in melted lead

Take cool well water and soak your hands for a while; then shake them, you can put them in a pan full of melted lead over a flame, and it will not cook you. It is even better if you put some ground rock alum in the water … to the uneducated … it will appear to be a miracle.

Last night’s effort consisted of a rather fun 3D game of Connect 4 called Gizeh. And then we played the Zombies!!! boardgame.

Gizeh really is quite brain tiring as it’s a race to win all the 4s and you keep score of them, unlike Connect 4 where you spend all your time trying to link a single 4. We ended up with scores in the 20s each.

Zombies!!! likewise is tiring but only because it leaves itself ripe for gut-splitting laughs as you quickly move from a game where you’d push someone out of the way to get ahead to the point where you’d push them, knock them over, spit on them, kick them in the ribs and give their mum the finger just for a single bullet counter.

Excellent.

Both of us at lategaming are fans of Super Hero games. For Matt, it’s because he misspent his youth reading comic books. For me, it’s because they’re the pinnacle of escapism, and one of my favourite campaigns I ever played in was a supers game.

In this supers game, we used the old Marvel system (not the old-old one, the one after that). Matt was the GM at the time, and his reason for choosing Marvel (when not playing in a Marvel universe) is that the system is very simple for resolving things, keeping the game fluid, and reducing the rules-lawyering or number-crunching which can plague other games (*cough*DC Heroes*cough*).

(Incidentally, we were talking the other day (again) about how all role-playing games are essentially super hero games–you have a character who probably has fairly broad strokes of personality (at least initially) and who has some kind of abilities which makes that character stand out from the crowd. Think about it: Vampire, D&D, Ars Magica, SLA Industries and so on ad infinitum. They all give you special powers and let you wreak havoc.)

So, when I first heard about the Saga system, which used cards for resolution in an effort to reduce the rules and numbers and promote role-playing and storytelling, I thought this was going to be excellent.

Enough rambling, let’s discuss some nitty-gritty. The game was actually published in 1998, but often that doesn’t mean much in the RPG world–I hadn’t even heard of it till last week. It was released in a boxed set (as were all the Marvel games) that comes with two books: one for rules and one with Marvel character stats in it. It also comes with a deck of cards that are used for all the resolution in the game.

The books are colour-covered but black and white on the inside. My first gripe with the game is that the font is some kind of Comic Sans-derivative font, which is incredibly hard on the eyes for reading long stretches of text, and of course should be banned. I think it’s acceptable in a comic book because those books are hand-drawn, so why not hand-written? In any other book, it smacks of amateurism. The cards that come with the game resemble those you might find in your average collectible trading card game. Full colour images of comic book heroes, with various semi-cryptic numbers and symbols wrapped around them. Having only black and white on the inside doesn’t bother me – this was after all in the age before the rise of very cheap digital printing.

The system itself is … interesting. You hold a certain number of cards in your hand at any given time (somewhere between 3 and 7, with 4 or 5 being normal for the X-men level characters). These cards are your hit-points (you discard cards when you get wounded), your dice rolls (they have random numbers on them which you use to determine success or failure) and your character/hero/karma points (i.e. using them in a particular way allows you to affect things more than you normally would be able to do). Having a hand of cards is a bit like saying you have five dice rolls to choose from each time you want to resolve something, and when you use one of them you have to roll that dice again to bring the total back up to five.

The cards have five suits. Each one is a different colour, is based on a different stat, and is named after a different Marvel character who exemplifies that stat. Resolution is as you might expect: take an ability/stat/skill/power and add the value of the card to beat some target value. The more experienced your character is, the more cards he/she can play at one time. The different suits also function as trumps for their relevant stat, so playing a “5 of Agility” from your hand for an agility based action allows you to draw a card from the top of the deck and add that to the total (and continue to draw and add for as long as you continue to draw the same trump suit).

One suit (Doom/Dr. Doom) has the added drawback that the GM (or Narrator as he’s known in this game) gets to keep those cards and use the numbers on them against you at inopportune times. This is a nice little thing the players have to keep in mind when they play those cards.

The downside of the cards is that they are completely relied upon for resolution of everything (even things like the weather, if you want). So what happens if you lose some or all of them? It’s not like dice where you can just go buy a new set. Perhaps in 1998 TSR planned to make the available to buy, but eBay is about the only place you might find them now. Also, I found the rules at times difficult to understand, but that could be just because I haven’t yet played it. Reading them didn’t make them become clear, and the examples they gave just served to muddy things even further.

The game is clearly intended to be used to play in the Marvel Universe, and with Marvel characters and a large number of the most popular are included in the Roster Book. The game itself is light on source material–it expects you to read the comics (or possibly some supplements) to fully understand anything about the universe or the characters. There’s no history or timeline as you might find in other game settings. Perhaps it’s naive of me to think that it might be necessary for those of us who haven’t read all the Marvel comics since the 1960s.

Character generation is fairly simple, but relies heavily on GM adjudication. In fact, the system is intended to be used to generate those characters that weren’t quite popular enough to be included in the Roster Book but that still feature in the comic books. It even goes so far as to say “bring the comic book with you to every session, so that everyone knows what your character looks like”.

In summary then:

Good

+ Cards are a neat idea
+ System emphasises roleplaying

Bad

– Cards can get lost/damaged and aren’t easily replaced
– System wasn’t easy to understand, examples even less so
– Lack of background info not so good for people who don’t read a lot of Marvel comics
– Bad font choice

Overall score: 3d6 (out of a possible 6d6)

If I played this game a bit to see how well the system actually worked, this might go up to 4d6.

This is more or less what LateGaming was meant to be.

The origin of the name was because we always started a gaming session by turning up between 7 and 7:30 pm. Then we’d settle by 8 pm and finish up gaming at 1 am. That was when I lived within walking distance of the game or when I was driving. Before that gaming would end at 10:50 pm to give me a chance to rush round to the train. When I moved up to Belfast it was a lot easier. I’d spend hours and hours just chatting to one of my housemates about stupid gaming-related topics. This was around the time when petrol stations started staying open all night meaning that we’d often take a walk round there to get milk for my coffee (Jeremy had, by this time, eschewed both milk and water in his coffee, preferring to just chew the grinds…)

So, in essence, it’s about being able to stay up late and play the games we love to play. It’s also about being able to tell stories about past games in order to learn something from them. We won’t bore you with “There was this one time, in AD&D….” stories. We’ll just give you ideas for your games which we found worked well for us.

With the change of LateGaming from an old-style static site, to something a little moe dynamic and, well, content-filled, we have some administrivia to take care of first.

---

Testament
“and one day, it was the end of the world. who knew? one day you wake up and well…you don’t wake up. it’s over. goodnight gracie. but then, what are you still doing here.”
You can download Testament here.

---

Creed
“something big is going down and you’ve got a ringside seat. turns out the world is ending and people who summon demons, people like you, people like me, are in deep shit.”
You can download Creed here.

---

The other LateGaming games might make it out the door…

As for Crucible Design games, you can likely get hold of them from Key20. So I’m told.

LateGaming was started in 2001 by Matt, who didn’t have a regular gaming group at the time and needed a fix for his desire to rant about role-playing games. Of course, blogging was in its infancy back then and he didn’t have the code-fu to hack something together himself, so it became something of a static site, serving some games that he’d written in his spare time, as well as information on Crucible Design, a gaming company of which he was a founding member.

Matt Johnston

Matt started gaming at the age of 11 with the help of issue 55 of White Dwarf. When this was spotted by the only other gamer in his school year who also happened to be in his class (John, 1L) then it was the beginning of a long love of interactive fiction, known also as role-playing.

When involved with QUB Dragonslayers as Society President, Matt was instrumental in the research of, funding of and running of Q-CON 1. He also took the role of Convention Director for two years running in two particularly successful years. He was also regularly seen on the Irish conventions scene, visiting Gaelcon and Warpcon for several years.

Matt has played (or bought) most games. In 1996, he published his first RPG, “The 23rd Letter” under the Crucible Design imprint. With Crucible Design, this was followed with “SpaceNinjaCyberCrisis XDO” and a 2nd Edition of “The 23rd Letter” in 1998 and finally with the release of Zombi in 2000.

Outside of Crucible Design under the LateGaming imprint, he self-published two PDF games “Testament” and “Creed”, which were the first two parts of a three part apocalyptic metaplot.

With the dissolution of Crucible Design in 2001, starting of a family in 2002 and the founding of a new business in 2003, he’s simply not had time to play games.

In 2006, that all changed. There are rants and comments, content created for games and interesting links usually containing the fantastic and the macabre.

Aidan Rogers

Aidan first started role-playing at the age of 13. A hand-written sign pointed the way under the school cafeteria to the art department where he first started playing Advanced Heroquest. He then joined the school role-playing society and continued to play all through high-school (he even organised two role-playing marathons, raising almost £1000 for charity–back then a lot of money).

Upon leaving high-school, he found his way into Dragonslayers at QUB, and became something of a cheerleader for Crucible Design, and indie gaming in Northern Ireland in general. For couple of years he worked for Games Workshop, which allowed him to game for a living, albeit more war-gaming than role-playing, but he wasn’t complaining.

Eventually he got a real job in IT, and ended up leaving Northern Ireland. Since then, he’s ran or participated in several gaming groups – in London, Boston, San Francisco and Sydney. His last group dissolved at the end of 2003, mostly due to family commitments.

Many of his gaming books have remained shelved (but never sold!) since then, until recently he and Matt decided it was time for one more roll of the dice.

Other contributors

Melody Wingfield

Melody’s introduction to gaming was simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time. She’d just finished reading Tolkien and the Dragonlance series when a friend of a friend mentioned they were starting up a roleplaying club afterschool. While she loved it, her father wasn’t incredibly impressed with the idea of his daughter taking up Satanic activity [insert requisite eye-rolling here], so the experience was shortlived.

Once free again to pursue her own interests, Rapunzel… er, Melody let down her hair and found a group of likeminded gaming-enthusiasts at UNC-Asheville. AD&D was the venue of choice, with a one-time-only-and-that-was-enough bout of Paladium in there for flavor. Through MUSHing, she discovered online rping, one particular vein of which led her to White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade.

She’s not really sure how she ended up as a GM. There’s a fuzzy memory akin to a shotgun wedding somewhere in her mind involving a stack of WW books and the fateful phrase “Hey, you should try running a game.” And from that point on, she’s probably spent more time in the GM’s chair running NPCs than actually playing a character. She’s also done LARP and wargaming, but nothing really holds her heart like good, old-fashioned paper and dice.

Years passed between the glory days and the present. Cross-country moves. More roleplaying. Boyfriends morphed into husbands morphed into “Was-bands”, and attempts at cloning herself proved highly successful. When someone asked if she was married recently, she was overheard replying “I’m in remission”. It’s amazing how the lack of a mate suddenly leaves all sorts of time for gaming. It was a good trade.

As to how a girl from the States ended up friends with an Irish guy and writing for his blog, now there’s a story for the telling… but not if there’s a game to be played.