I finally made time to see Avenue Q. Despite being in the last week of its run, the cast was amazingly energetic and delivered a top-quality show. I’ve been a big fan for years, having first being introduced at Radio Skid Row to “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist”, and subsequently to the World of Warcraft machinima for “The Internet is for Porn”. While these two numbers are definitely showstoppers, obtaining the complete soundtrack [iTunes] revealed a complete and touching story.
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Chainmail Bikini: Special Edition!
One of the more enjoyable webcomics of the last couple years was Chainmail Bikini, written by Shamus Young, drawn by Shawn Gaston, and (originally) hosted by Fear the Boot.
The comic ended abruptly after a fairly limited run, but it was a great dig at gamers in a Knights of the Dinner Table fashion. The archetypes are different, but more current.
Anyway, Shawn and Shamus recently relaunched Chainmail Bikini. They’ll be going through the original run of the comics but not much beyond that point, which is fine because what they did manage to put out is awesome. If you’re an old fan, you probably stopped reading several paragraphs ago. If you’re new, then I recommend going over and checking it out.
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SYDCON 2009
SYDCON was really great this year. We had well over 100 people sign up before the con started, and plenty of people rocked up for a casual game during the con. Everybody seemed to have a good time, which means our efforts as conorgs were successful.
Ok, conorg hat off and player hat on. I only played two games this year, both freeforms.
First up was “Judgement of Change”, a Dune freeform presented by Luke Strotz and Grant chapman. I played the vile Baron Harkonnen, who was written in such a way that he succeeded all his goals with very little effort. I basically had to ensure that House Atreides won their bid to take over Arrakis. Doing that amounted to being my usual disgusting self and allowing a coalition to form around Atreides. The only catch was to ensure it didn’t look like I wanted to lose the vote, so I actually had to pretend to scheme. I didn’t feel as necessarily powerful as the main controller of Spice production in the universe should. The main reason for that was the GMs continually handing out Spice so that addicted characters weren’t forced to deal with those of us stockpiling the stuff.
The other game I played was also a freeform, the last in the A Colder War campaign by the Troika group. “Dancing in the Dark” was pretty heavy mechanically, with a number of mini-games. The one that I was involved in was a little broken, to the detriment of all players who were using it.
I was playing the character I had from the previous session, Detweiler Earthbane. Previously, I had left my physical body and transcended into the “Source”, an alien technology capable of huge acts of creation and destruction. In this game, I spent much of the game listening intently to the “programs” left to administer the Source and watching it get depleted time and again by the humans tapping into it. I eventually determined that since mine was an organic mind capable of much more flexibility than the AI programming, I should be able to reprogram the system to prioritise the source requests of the AIs.
When I confirmed that this worked, I took over its function and made myself the sole arbiter of Source in the galaxy. Then the universe ended, and pretty much everybody got a desired outcome from the game.
I had a great time with both games. Congrats to the designers and GMs for stellar efforts. I look forward to seeing everybody at MacquarieCon and then EYECON.
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Something in the way she moves…
Wow. This was going to be “The Beatles: Rock Band first impressions” but after a couple weeks, that ship has probably sailed. I know it’s bad form to apologise for real life intruding on your blog, but it’s true: working weekends and going to class on one of your days off interferes with the amount of free time you have to write.
Instead, I’ve been trying to get in as much Beatles as possible. It’s a visually gorgeous game with a good mix of well-known and slightly more obscure (at least to my experience) tracks. I love both in-play and out-of-play elements.
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Batman in the (nut)house
Given all the hoohaa going round the Internet at the moment over Batman: Arkham Asylum, I figured I should at least try the demo.
Was I blown away. First of all, Rocksteady’s approach to making a demo really hit the nail on the head. Whereas The Force Unleashed‘s demo made the game out to be too fiddly to bother with, and Resident Evil 5‘s demo dropped me in the middle of a firefight with no explanation of the controls, Arkham Asylum starts at the beginning of the game with a light tutorial that teaches you the basics of combat, stealth, and the totally awesome “Detective Mode”.
I’m not a huge comic reader, but the game really captures the “Dark Knight” mode of Batman that I like. It’s about being a high-tech, enigmatic, tenebrous badass. He’s Sam Fisher without the handholding of the US government.
The combat is fluid and dynamic, the “Detective mode” adds an interesting dimension to the game, and the stealth system beats the pants off anything I’ve played before. This is definitely high on my must-play list.