Hey Man, well this is Babylon

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

In this post I talk about changes to Cannibal Contagion, I rave about the awesome game session from last night’s group gathering, and I review Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy.

On Cannibal Contagion

I thought about it pretty heavily over the weekend, and today I finalized my decision to remove the “Samurai Slaughterfest” bit from the name of Cannibal Contagion. This has kinda been nagging me for a while now, but didn’t jump into my mind full-focus until I found my original design document for the game over the weekend. There are a lot of initial ideas from that document that never made it into the current vision of the game, or that I’m holding onto for a lot more testing and possible release in an expansion - meaning, a whole lot of extraneous add-on kinda stuff. Read more

Let’s start with the quickies, and then we’ll talk gaming:

Reading: RunePunk
Wearing: Comfortable close-fitting clothes suitable for cycling. I love this weather.
Planning: The first session for the Sky Pirates game, this Sunday
Playing: Rule of Rose and Skies of Arcadia
Not Playing: The Siren: Blood Curse demo. Laaaaaaaaame. Tried it last night, and seriously, what’s with these crap-looking games not making the most of their platform’s hardware specs?
Writing: Some notes for various game design projects, mostly an Art List for the Cannibal Contagion book.
Listening: Pimsleur Spanish I
Watching: The Wire, Season 4. Man, the end of Season 3 almost brought tears to my eyes. One of the things that gets me the most is seeing people fail when they’ve worked so goddamned hard to succeed.
Anticipating: Dead Space in October. Read more

Yesterday I picked up the two modules I’ll be demoing on June 21st at Guardian Games for the upcoming 2nd Annual Free RPG Day. The two modules in question are “Take the Money” for the Tunnels and Trolls RPG, and the brand-spanking-new quick-start rules for Green Ronin’s upcoming A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying Game. I’ll save the T&T write-up for a later occasion - it’s fun, fairly ridiculous, and amazingly simple, and there’s not much more to really say about it. Let’s take a look at ASOIAF. Read more

Edit: Ugh. Yeah. As I said before, this game is obviously not for me. I’m not going to be touching it on here any further past this post. I’ve wasted enough time and front page space on this as it is. You would think I actually care about it, or something… *wink*

I am a failure as a reviewer. I just couldn’t finish my first character, but this hardly surprises me. In the last few years, I’ve reached a point where I can’t even make 3rd Ed. characters anymore. I’ll approach the game with a basic character concept, and by about halfway through the creation process I’ll realize one of two things: either I’ve been completely distracted by all the other character options and the idea has morphed entirely into a different min-maxed character altogether, or I just can’t make the character I want to play now (instead being forced to make the character who will be the character I want to play 10 or so levels from now). When a new 3rd Ed. game pops up - provided I even express a desire to play in it (a rare occasion) - I just ask the GM to make my character for me so I don’t have to worry about those problems. Hell, he can go ahead and plot me out a 20-level build plan while he’s at it, too. Read more

I’ve decided to take some deeper looks into this “4th Edition” thing. The next post or two will involve me looking through the book again, and giving some of my views, opinions, and reactions to its contents. I will also try and make a test character, and showcase how the system works. I’ll start with my reactions to the book’s inside art. The following are just cut-pasted from a running text document I’m keeping for recording the initial reactions, and I’m not going to bother editing them. Read more

…and I have a quick two-line review of it, for your reading pleasure:

If I wanted to play World of Warcraft, then I’d play World of Warcraft. This game is not for me.

- NPC

After a good deal of in-house testing and rules clarifications, I have the external Playtest Rules draft uploaded and ready to go. If anyone has a group that is open for a session or two of some quick pick-up zombie-survival gaming, please download this, give it a read, and let me know what you think. Included in the document is a sheet with a list of a handful of specific questions I have regarding the game play, and I’d greatly appreciate it if any playtesters would return to me with their answers after playing.

You can download the full 100 pages of the playtest rules (including both the sheets and the card templates) here. - Last Updated 9/27/2008

You can download both the Character and the CiC sheets separate from the rules: Player Sheets, CiC Sheet. - Last Updated 9/27/2008

You can download the printable NPC, Weapon, and Mojo cards separate from the rules here. - Last Updated 9/27/2008

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Update 9/27/2008 1:48 PM: Lots of changes! This is the fourth official release draft, greatly updated from previous releases.