Hey Man, well this is Babylon

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

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

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.

—–

Update 1/6/2009: The playtest rules have been taken offline, and the “open playtesting” stage of development has ended. Thanks for your support!