I guess I was completely off on this one, because when I first saw solicits for the Pirates Board Game many months ago, I assumed it would be a less rules-intensive, more gamer-noob-friendly version of the core Pirates trading figure game. Seemed like a great idea... invent a slimmer, easier edition that users the same pieces and basic concepts. Then sell it during the Pirates of the Caribbean movie push and get your gaming franchise under new sets of eyeballs.
I've almost bought the Pirates Board Game several times for just that reason. I like the little ships, but it would nice to have a ruleset that was less clunky. And now I'm glad I never did, because WizKids royally screwed the pooch on this one. They actually made it harder to play.
We found a booth at Origins selling it for only $15; I'm pretty sure $20-25 is a more average retail price, so I talked Chris into buying it. You get a playmat, enough ships to support two each for four players, a special captain card for each player, a Davy Jones card, a sea serpent and a kraken, plus some coins and curse tokens.
First problem: the playmat is, as promised, merely a thin plastic mat and not a sturdy board. So it will never stay flat, leaving ripples that make it impossible to get your ships to stay upright. This is a huge problem in a game like Pirates where the orientation and position of your ship matters from turn to turn. Unfortunately, the Pirates Board Game uses the same movement rules, where you have to measure movement using the usual R/W guides. It would have been a lot smarter to design a simplified ruleset that eschewed that fiddly miniatures-style move measuring... maybe something more board gamey with actual movement tiles on the ocean playmat.
Here's a couple brief movies, presented in Fuzzyvision via YouTube.
This is Thursday night in the card game hall, one of several massive rooms left open for organized events and 24-hour pickup games. This is where we tend to spend our evenings at Origins.
Ooh, another Origins success story. One of the closeout card shops let me buy a Mysterious Islands tournament kit for $2.50. These kits are a couple of small ships that come packed one to a booster box, the idea being that the game store that retails the box can use the tournament kit as prizes for in-store events. Either I don't know much about the true value of Mysterious Island tournament kits or the booth clerk didn't, but $2.50 sounded like a good deal to me. The pack has three tiny ships, including a British Turtle Ship that lacks the Turtle Ship keyword and a Pirate Galley that lacks the Galley keyword (hopefully both errata'd!)
I finally got around to playing Portal... and I will now join the chorus of supportalers. It's short, it's clever, it's got high production values, it's got a kick-ass theme song. Everybody who comes to our house will be required to play it at some point.
Seeing as I got Orange Box PS3 for like $15, it remains to be seen if I'll even bother playing the other games on the disk.
Rock Band 2 just may include the Rock Band 1 songlist for free.
This is still unsubstantiated, but an editor at IGN 360 says that the entire on-disk songlist of RB1 will be made available as a free download to owners of RB2. Heck, I'd even accept a nominal fee for that ability, but free is hard to ignore.
If this turns out to be false speculation, that 360 guy will be universally proclaimed a huge douchebag.
The last time I posted a Pearl Journal entry was back in September 07 when Toys R Us did the Manaphy download. This particular entry was started in November! I kinda fell out of the game around then (although five+ months of dedicated play ain't shabby at all), although I did keep some old notes about where I was, to wit:
The big news for me in November was that I finally started Pal Parking in captured pokemon from LeafGreen, Ruby and Sapphire. Like, a ton of them. First I brought over all my legendaries, then a ton of duplicate cheapies (Mankey! Rapidash! Manectric!) just for Pokedex purposes. That's really all the game is for me at this point: to see how close I can get to identifying all 480+ pokemon in my 'dex.
So I have to ask: why the ball preamble to Pal Park? The Park Balls are an instant capture, and finding the imported pokemon hidden inside the park grounds is not difficult. Another weird design choice from the people who turned Pokemon Contests into something fun into something painful and twenty minutes long.
Last November I caught Cressalia and Regigigas. I nabbed the Cressalia with my lv58 Gengar using his Psychic attack and a couple heals to keep him in the match. Took two Ultra Balls and Ten Dusk Balls to catch her. I do all this stuff at night to fully leverage the Dusk Balls.
I used my lv70 Mewtwo from LeafGreen to catch the Regigigas. Psychic, Swift, Swift, Recover and only six Dusk Balls.
So I've been writing for Aeropause.com here and there, some news items although mostly more webloggy bits like an ongoing series on Nintendo Power. And thanks to Aeropause I'm back in the business of writing formal reviews for games.
This week I created a bit o' gaming news in my latest NP feature, when an offhand scan I included was picked up by the big boys.
The scan in question was this ad for Disgaea DS, which I found in the latest Nintendo Power and thought was fairly amusing:
The new Ambush Bug miniseries starts at the end of this month and the covers for the first three issues have been revealed.
Issue 1, July 2008: The wait is over - everyone's favorite Bug is back, courtesy of the original AMBUSH BUG team of Keith Giffen and Robert Loren Fleming! Cities will be destroyed! Cats and dogs will live in sin! Every unanswered question of the DC Universe will be answered! Live heroes will die and dead heroes will live! Okay, none of that actually happens, but join us anyway for this totally irreverent romp through the DC Universe as only Ambush Bug could give you!
There's also a 1-in-10 variant cover for issue 1, but I haven't yet seen what that looks like. Probably the same but with a silver ink applied to the logo. Or a hologrammatic trading card of Cable.
Supaa Mario Garakishii Discussion (Select Button) A mostly-civil forum thread about Mario Galaxy, which stands as one of the few times I've read people actively disagreeing with Galaxy's supposed genius and trying to puzzle out why they feel that way.
School locked down after 'ninja' sighted in woods (phillyburbs.com) Can't you just hear the School Board? "If we didn't go into a lockdown on every rumored ninja sighting, imagine the outcry if a real ninja actually did find his or her way into our schools?!"
Did a six-player game of Zombies and the not-yet-in-stores Humans on Friday night... and craziness abounded. I don't think all the angles of this cube have yet been identified. It seems like it is waaaay harder for the shotgun-toting survivors to win, when pitted against the self-replicating player zombies. Also, the complications of wrangling two sets of mostly-new players with different turn phases gave me a headache and caused me to mis-rule on a lot of stuff.
I suspect all the elements are there - the Zombies system is so nicely modular - I should just pare the elements down into something simple and workable.
Also, how did I miss the expansion set that came with little Zombie Clown figures? Must get that.
Not into Zack & Wiki yet.
Finally started Zack & Wiki this week, after sitting on it unopened since Smash Brawl came out. I guess it must get a whole hell of a lot better, since everybody says it's overlooked genius, but the first hour was not a lot of fun. Too much preamble, lousy save system. So far, the whole experience seems like a game that isn't sure if it wants to be an RPG or a puzzle game, and it doesn't know how to gracefully meld the two.
Checked out three PS3 demos last weekend. I love demos.
Siren: Blood Curse - This is that survival horror dealie that's coming to PSN episodically in a few weeks. I haven't seen anything on the episodes' price or bonus features, so I'm still thinking about importing it from Japan. It will be sold in four parts, with a combined size of around 7 gigs. Urgh. I guess they're expecting you to pay for the episodes, finish the game, and then eventually get tired of having it around and delete it. Because 7 gigs is kind of a lot for a game that will likely have zero replay value and therefore no real reason to keep it on the drive.
The demo can be played in about ten minutes, but I enjoyed it.
Oddly, the demo does not employ the series' trademark feature... sight-jacking zombies. Instead, it's just very normal horror stuff. Scary cutscene, sneak past this guy, find a weapon, kill that guy, kill these other guys, take the girl to the mission end point. Looks great though, so maybe that's all the demo needs.
This is one of those No Big Announcement E3s. When the biggest fanboy shocker is that Final Fantasy XIII will be on 360 and PS3, you know that nothing really amazing happened. (Most links and all pics filched from my boys at Aeropause.)
Microsoft These guys are the home to all the franchises I could give a shit about. Fallout 3, Fable 2, Gears of War 2. Stuff I don't enjoy on a console that I'd need to repair three times. Xbox Live is getting a Portal sequel, but that seems unlikely to show up as a genuine exclusive. The 360 is headed toward third place, end of story.
And ho ho ho, how about the Mii Too avatar thing? What a colossal joke. How must the 360 fanboys feel now that their console is just as gay as the Wii. This is typical Microsoft... copy somebody else's super-successful feature, and do a shitty job at it, just so they can theoretically remove a bullet point from a competitor's feature list.
We don't know much about the new Animal Crossing (although admittedly we know more than we do about the new Pikmin), but we do have a very dull-as-dishwater trailer to ogle...
Barbapapa (Nature episode) (YouTube) My grandfather had a Barbapapa book that fascinated me as a kid. The book was about these blobby hippies who inspired eco-values. At some point, the Barbapapas were animated. This is one of those things that you swear nobody but you remembers.
In this episode, we learn where Seth MacFarlane ripped off the Peter-Hurts-His-Knee-For-Five-Minutes gag.
An Exchange with John K. (Michael Barrier) Another old page. I can't believe I just found it. It's a long email argument between historian Barrier and animator John K. about what constitutes good acting in cartoons.
From Dr. Horrible to Mr. Terrific. In the latest JSA, once again some faux-character development is presented in the form of a grasping Mr. Terrific questioning his athiesm. Uh-huh. It's exceptionally cool that Mr. T's race is never really a plot foible, just who he is... it would be great if his atheism could be treated with the same respect.
Buck up Michael. We all know Gog will turn out to be a robot. (Confession: I didn't think of that until I read it on Pretty, Fizzy Paradise!)
My latest podcast appearance is up, so please endeavor to enjoy it. It's definitely the sauciest I've been so far. Feels kinda weird to jump into an established podcast and start shitting on things, so I've been largely polite. This time those thrice-damned 360 Mii ripoffs got me going. It's nothing I haven't already said here, but it's probably fun to hear me say it.
Plus, there's ten seconds of silence while host Joe Haygood waits for me to react to the exciting announcement of a KOTOR MMORPG. Hee!
But what really has me psyched is that I gambled and scored on a Play-Asia order last week. They were running a summer sale where various in-stock merchandise was half off, or something like that. So I picked up a Pokemon keychain toy for Clark, and the DS rarity Slide Adventure: Mag Kid (which looks fascinating because it comes with an attachment that lets you move the DS around your table like an IR mouse). Smash Brawl players may recall a few spare Mag Kid stickers.
Finally got Mike to play Eye of Judgment... I don't think he was overly impressed. I still maintain that the core game is solid and clever, but all it takes is one fumbled scan and the weaknesses of the PS3 Eye system are laid bare. His main objection was that it was too slow... and as we waited for the camera to read a card, I had to admit he was right about that.
I ended up buying the $15 expansion... or rather, the $15 119k key that unlocks the 2gig expansion I downloaded last week. Proof:
We played Doomtown for the first time in two years. Ow. At that age, it's tough to remember anything about the game, so I don't know if I ever faced his Maze Rats Forced Lowball deck before. It's an old trick, but a good one... he has eight Events that either turn all shootouts into lowball, or make players draw shootout hands from the opponent's deck. So of course his deck is purposefully lousy, resulting in a lot of wins. I tried a Dixie Rails deck against it, and came up incredibly short. He even got lucky on my Harrowed pulls, sending most of my supposedly immortal zombie guys to the discard pile.
Fatal Frame 4 trailer (Wii) (YouTube) Oooooohhhhh, this looks so freaking good. I am extremely happy that Suda 51 didn't tart this up to look like Killer 7 or No More Heroes.
Atheism in the DCU (Pretty, Fizzy Paradise) Kalinara and her commenters discuss the recent retread of Mr. Terrific questioning his atheism in JSA. They come to pretty much the same conclusion I wrote about two years ago during Infinite Crisis, that a rational mind in the DCU, having repeated contact with "gods" and heroes with godlike powers, would seriously question the worthiness, existence and veracity of the Christian God.
The Color of Politics (Second Printing) Ha! Ben Hatten assigns the rainbow Power Rings to various political figures, including the Orange Ring of greed to Hillary Clinton.
Holy crap, check this trailer for the latest Batman animated series...
How fucking fun does that look! I've long bemoaned the 1960s Batman TV series as sort of painting comic book super-heroes into a bam-pow corner for the past forty years, but there's still room for fun without being wink-wink cheesy and full of self-loathing. It's rather astounding that they're going for a no-Gotham, silly-prop Batman so soon after The Dark Knight. (article here)
And I like that art style so much better than the stiff body copy/paste that Justice League devolved into.
I was digging through the discounted games shelves at Target. Although you can still find some bargains in there (Drill Dozer $10! No More Heroes $30!), most of the selection is complete rubbish.
Wouldn't the subtitle "Swine of the Night" have made a much better title?
As I mentioned in Aeropodcast #42, I recently picked up Sony's 2007 Fumble, Lair. I mean, how bad could it be for $15, right?
It is seriously incredibly superbad.
It is nothing less than astonishing that Sony took this game to hype and back when they had to know that Lair was just about complete trash. And Factor 5, they of Rogue Squadron fame - what in fuck happened to them? This should have been right in their wheelhouse, being another damn flying game, but it is boned over from the minute you start playing.
I should shoot some movies of this game in failing action, because it is hilarious. The tutorial level begins with your dragonrider dude, standing on a castle rampart, being told he has to jump on the dragon. Well, the first thing I do whenever I start a game is hit the pause screen to look over the options. So I do that, and it's slow as hell to bring up the options menu, but whatever. The horrible bit is that when I bail out of options, there's a good second where you can see the castle draw in. Like, the little spiky pyramid bricks decorating the castle balustrade actually build themselves out of thin air, like a Sesame Street short where one tiny ball of clay becomes a large ball of clay.
I guess I was completely off on this one, because when I first saw solicits for the 
Yep. Portal is great.
Rock Band 2 just may include the Rock Band 1 songlist for free.
The last time I posted a Pearl Journal entry was 
Zombies / Humans combo missing some beats.
Not into Zack & Wiki yet.
Yes, yes, fine, Dr. Horrible is good.
Not this god thing again.
On this week's Aeropodcast, I...
He repeats what we say.
