Hey Man, well this is Babylon

I’ve found lately that I have been listening to two specific albums more than anything else while working on my design projects. They are:

1. Forbidden Forest: Impressions of George Winston by Taliesin Orchestra. There’s something about this album which deeply inspires me in the way no other music does. I’ve listened to all the original piano pieces upon which these tracks are based, but the originals just don’t compare to the orchestrated renditions. Starting with the very first track on the album, “Tamarack Pines,” I am swept away into a different realm of my creativity. Thanks immensely, Chris, for introducing me to this one.
2. Silent Hill Shattered Memories – original soundtrack by Akira Yamaoka. This is so far my favorite of the consistently amazing Silent Hill soundtracks, narrowly edging above the previous favorite, Silent Hill 4: The Room. Mary Elizabeth McGlynn’s vocal performances are stellar, as always, and in my opinion this album showcases the best work she’s done so far on the series. Something about the haunting ethereal underscores mixed with stellar (and sometimes totally rocking) vocal tracks keeps this one consistently repeating in the background while I work. I actually attempted to make a mix of nothing but McGlynn’s vocal tracks, but the project was only partially successful: the playlist was pretty damn awesome, but I found I couldn’t stop rocking along with the music long enough to get any actual work done.

There are a few others in rotation, including Danse Macabre by The Faint, Vegas by The Crystal Method, Nothing Lasts… But Nothing Is Lost by Shpongle, and the musical score to the movie Master and Commander. These play pretty frequently on my background mixes, but it is the two albums detailed above which always start it off, and which I always kick back into play when I hit a lull in the process.

What are yours?

This past weekend I had the unexpected pleasure of running a last-minute session of the new Warhammer Fantasy RPG – the 3rd Edition boxed set from Fantasy Fight Games, to be specific. The folks over at Gnome Stew have an excellent “unpacking” article on the game, with lots of pictures of its juicy innards, so I’ll skip that part and get right to the fun.

I’ve had this for a couple of weeks now, and have been itching to give it a test run. I wasn’t expecting to break it out in full game mode so soon, having only read the player book and most of the GM book (and not even touching the magic books yet). But when the call came in, it was the first thing that popped into mind, and in hindsight, I think it was a great idea. Despite none of us having any real experience with it, the end result was a very positive one. Read more

It’s pretty spot-on, I believe. Check it out on RPG.net.

“Cannibal Contagion is an enjoyable game that stays true to the design goals. It’s fun, easy to pick up, and has some very nice features for player interaction and character conflict. The scope, of course, is quite narrow both in terms of what characters can and can’t do and the environment they interact with. Others elements are inevitably dealt with a lot of hand-wavin’ and impromptu rules; the game is about “comedic survival horror” and not really much else. It is firmly located in the beer-and-pretzels one-off genre of games and should be seen in that perspective, which it achieves admirably.”

Thanks, Lev!

I can hear the unwashed thousands of die-hard old-schoolers right now, screaming cries of “blasphemy” and “heresy” at my entitlement of this post – but then again, I doubt any of them actually read this blog, so perhaps I’m just hallucinating. But for a second round of added emphasis, I will repeat: Shadowrun is finally awesome again.

That’s right. I said it. Shut up. Read more

Aaron at Geek in the City has posted what I believe is the first-ever online review of my game.

With hyper action and frantic role-playing, Cannibal Contagion is the perfect game for the player that just wants to have some balls out undead fun.

Wow! Thanks, Aaron!

These past two weekends, I had the good fortune to play in several sessions of a godsbedamned fantastic board game called Last Night on Earth. I’ve been told by a handful of people that this game went out of print, but everyone and their undead grandmother seems to be getting brand new copies of it lately, so I’m unsure if that scarcity is in fact true. Either way, come hell or high water, I’m getting myself a copy of this.

I first got to play it at Guardian Games last weekend during the May of the Dead zombie celebrations. I only managed to get int a couple of turns, because I was busy dealing with Cannibal Contagion and socializing with a lot of awesome new people. But the few turns I did play quickly seduced me into wanting more.

An old gaming buddy of mine was in town this very past weekend, and we all met up at a friend’s house last night for an evening of beer and board games. As a nice stroke of good fortune, someone showed up with this game in tow, and we got in two good six-player sessions of it before I had to leave. There was a lot of stumbling here and there as we got used to some of the more specific rules, but for the most part, everyone took to the game very easily and we all had a blast. I figured I would take some time today and write up a review-like post on my experiences. Read more

Last night I played my first game of Left 4 Dead in months, and while a bit rusty, we kicked ass. It was great to buy a new Xbox, take it home, plug it in, and get an invite to play within 10 minutes. Fabulous. So yeah, I have zombies on the mind, oh yes.

The Cannibal Contagion Print Draft is about… 3/8 of the way to completion. I’ve got the basics the way I want them, and I’ve formatted and inserted the art all the way through to just at the end of the character creation section. I want to take this moment to once again elucidate how fucking awesome I think the internal art is. Leo and Vero did a knock-down bang-up fantastic job capturing exactly the feel I was looking for. I’m almost getting a bit choked up each time I place another of their pieces within the text, because each one works so damned perfectly. Seriously, folks, mega kudos. You rock.

Something else? Thanks to working on this document, I can’t get “Eye of the Tiger” out of my head.

One Last Thing: I Promise you, I am working on some play reviews of the GameStorm sessions. However, they are far from complete, and I’m choosing to put more creative direction into assembling the print draft of the game by next week’s deadline. So, once that deadline is reached, and the draft has been sent to the printer, rest assured there will be reports. Oh yes.

Warning: this post contains spoilers for the show Avatar: The Last Airbender. Read more

I tried playing a little more of Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, and it just further solidified my opinions on this game. I really like the game’s mechanics. I love third-person shooters, and I think the way that gameplay was implemented in K&L is perfect for the heist style of game. But goddamn, I hate both of the main characters in this game, and have absolutely no sympathy for them whatsoever. One is a mass murdering bank robber who misses his family (boo fucking hoo), the other is a mass murdering schizophrenic nutjob who is just misunderstood by everyone (boo fucking hoo), and neither of them have a single quality trait that makes them likeable. Seriously, designers, what the fuck were you thinking? Trying to cash in on the wave of lucrative immorality made popular by that terrible Grand Theft Auto franchise, is my guess.

Read more

Add another entry to the Games I Won’t Be Buying category: Final Fantasy Tactics A2, for the Nintendo DS.

I’m sad to say that I’ve just this morning lost interest in Final Fantasy Tactics A2. I was enjoying it, but felt my excitement steadily waning as I “progressed” further in the game’s so-called story. Tactics A2 is another game in the Final Fantasy franchise that features a Job System, wherein you can change each and every character’s array of abilities around and focus them in all different directions at any time. You can specialize, generalize, and even pursue some pretty esoteric combinations of empowerment. Some jobs are better than others, though, and if you spend to long in one of these sub-par jobs you can seriously gimp your character’s long-term play worth. As such, one of the main features to skillful gameplay is effectively strategizing your characters’ jobs and abilities, planning out their builds a bit in advance so as to ensure maximum battlefield efficiency. Read more