Hey Man, well this is Babylon

Ammunition in shooter video games is up near the top of my list of Most Ridiculous Video Game Conventions out there today. Seemingly implemented because “that’s what you always do,” the mechanics are purportedly intended to instill a sense of urgency within the player, who should try and make every shot count. In reality, legacy imbalances within the standard implementation of these mechanics almost universally result in half-assed pacing mechanics that seem tacked-on at best, and controller-throwingly frustrating at worst. Read more

It’s been a while since I’ve had this part of my gaming needs so excited:

It’s also been a while since I’ve had a Friday night so wide open and free to dedicate to the pursuit of purely nerdy pleasures. I must have spent full-on weeks of my youthful life plowing intensely forward through each of the many Romance of the Three Kingdoms games. Tonight, I shall try and recapture this experience, only this time in Ancient Japan.

I’ll try and remember to post more about it during and after tonight’s experience.

I’m in something of a High Nirvana era of personal gaming enjoyment. I feel that there are more awesome gaming opportunities around me than ever before in my life. Tabletop, Video, Design, it’s a veritable cornucopia of exciting play. Let’s review!

As far as my table-topping goes, I’m in the middle of at least two games, with two more on the horizon. First is my Old School Palladium Fantasy sandbox game, which has had four gatherings so far and seems to be maintaining everyone’s excitement pretty nicely. This game is really doing a good job of reinvigorating me, both as an arbiter of events and as a creator of spontaneous content. I haven’t run this seat-of-the-pants in a long, long time, and it is quite simply titillating my gamer imagination. I go into each session with a mental picture of all the events happening in the world within a 20-mile radius of where the characters are, and as they move around, those events progress of their own accord. So far, the players have managed to hit up most of them quite nicely, and get themselves directly involved of their own volition. It’s wonderful. Read more