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| Friday, December 3, 2004 03:42 PM |
| Love and Geekery |
 by Fëanor |
I'm feeling much better today! I think I'm almost over the cold or whatever it is I've had this week (either that or the DayQuil is repressing it mightily). And I've been having fun with two things I very much enjoy--games and poppy.
Game-wise, I speak of two things. First of all, I am soon to embark upon my first D&D campaign (2nd edition, Forgotten Realms), and I am extremely excited. I am itching desperately to snatch up a fistful of six-sided dice and create my character. I've decided I want to be a half-elven, multi-classing cleric/ranger. Maybe a little complicated for my first time through, but what the hey--I want to have the full experience here. I didn't like the weapons restrictions that the basic cleric class gives you, but D&D wise one and sage TrackerNeil pointed me towards certain tomes which, when pored over carefully, revealed the mythos that allowed the combination of weapons and spells that I wanted. Long story short, my cleric shall be a windwalker. This means I get healing spells and other such cool stuff, and I can still wield swords and bows. Sweet.
The other game I speak of is HeroScape, which Peccable recently purchased, and which he, TrackerNeil, Super Tarzan, and myself all played for the first time last night at game night (while poppy sat with us and knitted). Peccable and I had read about the game a long time ago and had been discussing it for some time. I'd originally thought it looked like a rather dull war game that would probably frustrate me, and dismissed it out of hand. Peccable examined it more carefully, especially after it showed up on the top ten at BoardGameGeek.com, and eventually took the plunge and made the purchase. I think we all agree that it was a good buy. The game (or at least, the advanced version of the game that we played) is actually a lot more interesting than I originally thought. The premise is that each player is in command of an army of warriors, which can be taken from a pool of fighters from across time and space, including samurai, giant robots, and dragons, and you're all fighting for dominance. It involves a lot of interesting decision-making and strategy in building and placing your soldiers, arraying them for battle, making proper use of their strengths, and trying to minimize their weaknesses. And you get to fight with Vikings and dinosaurs and stuff, by moving them around on hexes and rolling dice. Sweet!
The game comes with a ton of really durable and nice-looking terrain hexes and figures. One of the multiple instruction manuals has a bunch of scenarios in it, each with its own terrain formations and special rules to make things interesting. But of course the game is endlessly customizable; you can make up your own scenarios, with your own terrain maps and special rules. And the company will be selling expansion packs to the game with more figures to add to your pool of warriors.
The only problem with the game is that it takes a while to get started. There's a great mass of rules and diagrams that are rather intimidating and complex. Also, the setup takes a really long time and is quite difficult. Poor Peccable kept having to look back and forth between the map in the manual and the giant pile of terrain hexes and make tiny adjustments until everything was finally right. (The rest of us very helpfully sat by and heckled him while he did this.)
But the game is actually quite easy to understand and to play once you get into it, and is really a lot of fun. Especially when you have an Orc riding a dinosaur going around eating your enemies. Hee hee.
Of course, it helped that Super Tarzan and I (we played teams) owned that Orc and his dinosaur, and won handily. The jury is out on whether we were just lucky, or we were lucky and the game is unbalanced. I'm hoping that the game is not unbalanced because I enjoyed it quite a lot and mean to play again as soon as possible.
Let's see, what else is going on...ah, yes. At movie night, we started watching Angels in America, which is as fantastic as everyone told me it would be. I'll hold off more detailed commentary until we finish watching it (which will take two more weeks, as it is six hours long!).
Also, I've been neglecting football lately. I even missed the last Eagles game. I was having game day that day, and I didn't even think to put in a tape for it. As I understand it, it was a close game until the second half, then the Eagles exploded and laid the Giants flat. So, pretty much like the previous game. They're looking very strong. They've clinched the NFC East title (the third team since 1978 to do it in so few games) and now they're guaranteed a trip to the play-offs. They can safely lose the next five games, although of course they won't. Could be a tough game on Sunday vs. the Packers, though. Maybe I can get it together and actually watch this one.
But also on TV this Sunday will be a questionable piece of programming called "The Librarian," subtitled "Quest for the Spear." It looks like an Indiana Jones clone. No doubt it will be stupid, but hopefully it will also be fun. And it's about an adventuring librarian, so how can my aspiring-librarian wife and I possibly miss it?
Speaking of this weekend, I'm looking forward to seeing the Pixies with bloginator and Darryl tomorrow. They rock pretty hard, and I hear nothing but good things about this reunion tour of theirs.
As I understand it, Poppy and Leo will be working on both computers for most of the weekend, so I expect I'll be doing a lot of reading and console-gaming. I recently defeated the single player, Weapon Master portion of Soul Calibur II, but just like in the original Legend of Zelda, the whole thing starts again when you win, and all the levels are different. So, I've got plenty of gaming material. And I also have much reading material, as Poppy recently showed me the graphic novel section of her library, and I snatched up a bunch of stuff. The first thing I read was a Green Lantern/Green Arrow/Batman crossover collection by Denny O'Neil (entitled The Ring, the Arrow, and The Bat, btw) that was okay, but kind of corny. But I just finished Volume One of Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and it was totally fantastic, from front cover to back cover. Even the "about the author" text on the back was awesome--it was completely fictional and completely hilarious. I do love that Alan Moore. Who else would write a book with "superheroes" who commit mass murder and molest young girls? I have to get my hands on volume two as soon as possible.
Anyways, I think I'm finally done with this post. Later. |
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