Chatty's Review: Mario Kart Weeee!
Wha? What the hell am I doing here you ask?
It’s quite simple really, I felt like reviewing a Video Game and this here site here actually covers that particular niche better than mine (Obligatory shameless plug? Check.)
So we’re cool? Cool!
Ok, here’s the thing. My lovely wife is currently gone for a few days, working as a consulting Speech Pathologist in the Frozen Wastelands of Northern Quebec (I’m from Montreal if you don’t know me.) This leaves me to guard the fort with my two very adorable children: My 6 year old son and “4 and half” daughter.
Since my wife is out there getting paid consultant fees, I decided that we could afford some new games for our consoles (PS2 and Wii) and that it was my duty as caring father to provide my kids with quality interactive entertainment.
(Chatty pauses, expecting lightning to strike him while he weaves all that BS into a hopefully entertaining narrative.)
Long story short, we got Mario Kart Wii from the local EBGames (along with a Disney Princess Game and a DDR game.)
By the way, they were “selling” Mario Kart Wii for 10$ in exchange for a copy of Super Mario Galaxy, Super Mario Strikers or Mario Party 8. I don’t know if the Stateside EBGames offer this deal but it’s ongoing in Baconada (Obligatory Canadian Bacon reference? Check!) [Read the rest of this article]
Chatty's bid for world domination!
Actually not really.
This is just a quick note to tell you that I wrote a guest review of Mario Kart Wii over at Critical Hits. I thought it would be more appropriate over there than here.
So if Video Games are your cup of tea, head on over there and have a quick read.
Also, I take the occasion to say that Critical Hits is an excellent Geek blog that also covers, among many things, movies, board games and Role Playing games. It’s part of my daily reads and I started blogging partly because of the cool things I saw these guys do.
Enjoy.
Review: Incan Gold
The Big Picture: Incan Gold is a light push-your-luck game with an Indiana Jones-esque theme that is suitable as a nice filler for serious gamers and as a mainstay for family gamers. Essentially, you and the other players search through ancient Incan ruins for treasure, trying to avoid all manner of traps and dangers along the way. Incan Gold, designed by Alan R. Moon and Bruno Faidutti, is an American remake of the game Diamant. The game supports up to 8 players, and plays in about 20 minutes. Its short length allows for multiple rounds to be played back-to-back, and given how fun the game is, you will be hard pressed to resist doing so.
The Details: Each turn, every player is forced to make a choice: “Do I stay or do I go?” While that might sound a bit simple (and it is), the decision is oftentimes agonizing, and hence the brilliance of the game. [Read the rest of this article]
Chatty's Out of the Box #007: Itsy Bitsy and Horny
As it been a month already since I posted a Comic? Good thing I never promised to deliver this on a schedule.
Here it is. As usual, click on the comic to see it full size.
This time I had 2 concepts in mind:
- start introducing the 4e miniatures to my collection
- Have fun with the Warlock’s association with Bugs, bats and spiders.
When I noticed that the Elven Warlock of the Dungeons of Dread collection was, well, apparently designed to deliver some Fan Service, I couldn’t resist bringing back Kermit “call me K” the Slaad.
Oh and I’m sure the Warlock has no such Baleful Polymorph effect but I had this great 4e Deathjump Spider mini that begged to be used.
I’m getting the hang of doing those pictures, I really like how they look. However, I’m starting to feel constrained by Comic Book Creator’s rather limited collection of clip art (I’d have preferred a Zap! instead of a Boom). I guess I’ll need to start hunting for better ones or ‘gasp’, make my own.
Still these are fun to do… although they tend to take longer than writing actual posts!
Have a great weekend y’all.
Free Comic Book Day is Tomorrow
Somehow this year’s FCBD almost slipped by me- there seems to be a palpable lack of buzz around it this year, and I’ve barely seen it mentioned in any of the comic blogs. Has the event become tired and worn? Has the emphasis shifted from corporate level advertising to stores doing their own things to promote it? Who knows!
Anyway, the list of comics is at the official site, as always. Usually I try to pick up some more obscure titles to get into new stuff, and generally fail (either because the store is being stupid or the store is picked clean before I can rouse myself from bed.) Maybe I’ll make it a FCBD tradition to try a new comic store every year.
Review: Iron Man
General: Iron Man is a faithful fun-filled adaptation of one the most flawed heroes in comicdom. Tony Stark is a womanizing, irresponsible, hard-partying, smug son of a bitch, but he’s super-cool. His ascendancy into superherodom doesn’t necessarily change that, it just gives him a sense of obligations and duty. His origins remain true in spirit, but updated to a more modern context.
Plot: Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is the wunderkind industrialist inventor arms dealer that keeps America safe with the help of his dedicated personal assistant, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). He and his military liaison Jim Rhodes (Terrance Howard) head to Afghanistan for an arms test. During that foray, his assumptions about his arms and their role in America’s defense are sorely tested. Tony then vows to make a difference, with the help of his own genius and Stark technology. Along the way, his dubiously moral business partner Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges) seemingly works to balance Tony’s newfound conscience and the Stark bottom line.
[Read the rest of this article]
Pathfinder #8 Preview: Seven days to the Grave
I’m going to be a single dad for the next few days. My lovely wife is doing some consulting work in the great North and I hold the fort here in Montreal with my 6 year old son and 4 year old daughter. My online presence might be somewhat limited.
Yesterday’s mail brought up a rather hefty package from Paizo.
I opened it and lo and Behold, I got the next issue of Pathfinder as well as the long lost Issue #4 I never got back in December! Weee!
On to the review:
Adventure Synopsis
A plague breaks out exceedingly fast in the city of Korvosa and catches the PCs in the middle of it. Drafted by a church, the PCs fight a losing battle against the spread of the plague.
As they progress in the adventure, the PCs trace the ones responsible for the plague and follow the chain of guilt up to the City’s newest Monarch.
High Level critique
I’m not going to do a critique based on it’s content because the adventure actually failed to interest me. It’s a series of Urban scenes that develop the story of a unnatural plague spreading in a city and nothing can do anything about it.
(The Authors are very careful to point out that there are not enough clerics to cast sufficient Remove Disease in the city to prevent it).
That being said, I’m not much of a fan of Investigation-driven urban adventures.
To my eayes, the plot feels rather railroady as it assumes that the players will help the uncle (a NPC they met in the 1st part of the adventure) of a young girl that fell sick from the plague. It’s expected that the PCs will cough up the cash needed to heal her.
Then the adventure assumes that the players will side with the church that charges to heal people to investigate the plague further.
One reason why I don’t catch on the adventure is that I don’t really like Gritty adventures all that much, especially at low levels. Getting PCs caught in the middle of an outbreak, while great on paper, forces players to live the pretty unheroic role of trying to find the source of the plagues while people are dying.
I’m perfectly aware that a few weeks I specifically argued the opposite that you should have the apocalypse hit your campaign once in a while. However, in my mind, you should do that when the PCs are used to the gaming world and are established heroes of said world.
When nothing much can threaten the PCs, threatening the world is an appropriate approach.
But now, we have a bunch of level 4 PCs stuck in a plague-ridden, chaos-filled city being played by a Queen gone insane. In my book, that’s not the kind of adventure I picture my players enjoying.
Oh and yes, the Queen they so romantically saved in the 1st part is the actual BBEG here, she can’t bear having to be the monarch of the unwashed and the poor.
That being said, you might really dig that type of against the clock investigative adventure.
Bottom line, with my interest in 3.X melting faster than ice in a Fission reactor and the failure of the product to grip my interest, I will put an end to my subscription. While the product remains a very high quality one, its contents no longer meet my needs as a gamer.
If and when Paizo goes 4e, I’ll revisit the line.
Breakdown of the Issue
- Introduction: Where the editor talks about the real challenges of making disease an actual, non laughable challenge in D&D (The solution, hit the world, not the PCs)
- Seven Days to the Grave by F. Wesley Schneider: A 52 page urban adventure taking characters from level 4-7.
- Plague and Pestilence by Rick Miller and Edward P. Healy: A 6 page essay on comparing Fantasy plagues with real world ones. Interesting for people with limited background in medical microbiology
. It covers Epidemics, Pandemics, Medieval Physician equipment, new Diseases and herbal remedies. - Abadar by Sean K Reynolds: The description of the Church of Abadar, God of cities and laws.
- The Pathfinder’s Journal by James Jacobs: The usual World specific background presented through the eyes of ‘historical’ pathfinders
- The Bestiary by Sean K Reynolds and F. Wesley Schneider
- A random Encounter table for the Korvosa Crypts
- The Luekodaemon: A CR 9bNeutral Evil Plaguebringer Fiend (Paizo’s take on the Yugoloths)
- Daughter of Urgathoa: A CR 8 undead tentacled monstrosity
- A Giant Fly/Giant Maggot: A CR1 Fly and a CR 1/2 offal eater… ‘Nuff said.
- The Lawgiver: A CR 15 Gargantuan Construct with a Freaking Big Hammer.
- The Nosferatu: Ugly Vampire Template that can turn into a Swarm.
YMMV… Have a nice weekend!
2008 Origins Awards Nominees Announced
Found over at Gaming Report. Hit the jump for the full list. As usual, there’s some good stuff in there, along with a healthy dose of WTF? (For example, Bankruptcy is one of the worst games I have ever played, and yet, there it is…)
Like last year, I intend to cover the awards ceremony at Origins.
First Impressions: GTA IV
I had not originally planned to pick up Grand Theft Auto 4 anytime soon, but when your wife asks you to go out and buy GTA any hesitation would be a grievous offense. We got it for the 360 because we don’t own a PS3, and also because achievements are our console gaming lifeblood. Now I hadn’t actually been following any pre-release information for this game, aside from viewing one of the trailers about 6 months ago which made me laugh because of the “GetaLife” building and other parodies of famous New York landmarks. So essentially, this was as clean a slate going into a game as you can get these days and when you consider that this is the fourth in a series and the follow-up to such a wildly popular game.
The game starts up with a beautiful in-game cinematic intro that feels so much like a movie that you begin to wonder if you bought the wrong thing, this could be entirely due to the fact that they’ve skillfully placed credits into the beginning of the game, I assume this is to make things easier for the lawyers. The beginning pretty quickly introduces you to the main character and the overall feel of the game, both visually and through the excellent audio, and addresses one of my main gripes with the game’s predecessor. In GTA3 I felt that there was very little prompting to actually get involved in the plot, of the hours and hours of time I spent in that game, almost none were spent advancing the in game plot because I simply had more fun running around and playing with the world that was there. With GTA4, you are hit smack in the face with the plot, which I imagine will be a gripe for many people as they are forced to sit through at least 15-20 minutes of initial set up plot to get to where they can run around and go crazy. [Read the rest of this article]
10 word contest update
As of 9h30 AM Thursday morning, we have 72 entrants who submitted 457 entries in the contest.
I removed a few of the more nonsensical ones (mostly the ones that talked about me, the blog or old times…)
I’m still thinking about how to go at it for judging.
In the meantime, I’ve created a special room in my forums where people will be able to discuss this and see all the Entries per submitter (You’ll need to register to participate, sorry, but it’s open for reading to guests).
I’ll move the entries per submitter this morning and update periodically.
Have a nice day.
Edit:
Check out Tommi’s Generator using all our ideas! Wee! Thanks man!
