John Zeitler

Last night was the first time I’d played WH40K in a non-competitive setting. It sounds backwards to think that I went straight for a tournament as my first time (back in November); but that tournament was explicitly for new players, was at an opportunity when I wanted to get further into it, and I hadn’t had time to properly prepare a full army between then and last weekend’s tournament. Once I got through that, though, I realized that I didn’t have to go to such lengths to get a feel for the game; the Friday night groups at Legions are far more relaxed than I thought they’d be.

The end result is that I think I made a good impression on the other players (instead of “here’s some jackass who’ll drop by once with some half-assembled pile of crap, get frustrated, and then never come back again”, I hope I managed at least “here’s a guy who’s new to the hobby but is pretty committed to it, and he’s willing to learn”), and I have a new destination for Friday nights (usually). Oh, and I started seriously putting together the third army after realizing the value of vehicles (in my defense, my first exposure to them was an Ork Trukk which is not exactly known for reliability or even usability). Gonna be a while before that one’s ready (spent today putting together half of what I had bought previously) but it’s going to be a riot.

Catch you folks tomorrow, when maybe I’ll get back to FF13; that’s not a knock on the game, I just felt more motivated to do figure work today.

For anyone interested, there’re photos of the Warhammer 40K event I participated in over here. Surprisingly all three of my matches are documented there, early on, at any rate. You can tell they’re early on because I still have pieces on the board…

The concept of a Warhammer tournament is a little different from what’s usually thought of by the word. Unlike, say, a poker tournament or a basketball tournament, every participant in these events plays the full complement of games (usually three). Matches are made at each stage of the tournament, usually by rankings, so that everyone stays competitive at any point– a player who gets blown away in his first match could get decisive victories in the next two and come away with an overall win.

Furthermore, since each player has a distinctly different set of figures, and mission objectives change with each stage, there’s almost no predicting what you’ll face. For example, in my Round 2, I wound up taking the attacker’s role against a set of Chaos Space Marines… who were defending by not defending. My opponent chose to keep all of his forces in reserve, let me blunder in and wonder what happened– which also negated the orbital bombardment that I was entitled to at the beginning of the match, because there was nothing there to hit– and subsequently wiped the floor with me.

Overall, though, the $5 or so you pay as an entry fee is really more of a token gesture to the shop hosting the event. That five bucks guarantees you about six to eight hours of wargaming in a competitive and friendly environment. Some shops or clubs will even provide pizza or drinks. Really, it’s best not to go in thinking you’ll win, because unless you’ve got a decent amount of experience behind you, you probably won’t. Instead, focus on the game itself and enjoying the play, rather than obsessing over the results.

Oh, and incidentally: I learned the importance of vehicles. I’d been thinking they were just big targets, but they might just be worth having a couple around… which is why my Imperial Guard army is going to be fitted up with four tanks and four assault carriers.

As mentioned, I’m not terribly fond of the Space Marine faction to begin with, but this trailer does show da Orkz in fine form. Odd, then, that the SMs are my first full army…

Today was pretty quiet, folks. I mean, sure, I went out and did some stuff, and I stayed in and did some other stuff, but by and large I didn’t accomplish anything that could be reasonably construed as productive. Note that I don’t count assembling Warhammer miniatures as “productive”, even though I put together twenty of them. I could put together the last ten if I wanted to, but honestly I don’t feel like it just yet.

That’s the thing about weekends when you live alone. Once certain household chores are done, you pretty much are on your own time. I love it. Of course, this doesn’t stop me from feeling vaguely guilty for not accomplishing anything over the course of a day or so, but that’s just me. And besides, I set my own goals these days, and so going by that measure I did everything I wanted to this weekend. Which really was nothing.

I could get used to this whole “relaxing weekend” thing.

Welcome to 2010, ladies and gentlemen. At least three hundred and sixty five posts from now, we’ll be counting down to 2011.

I realize that I’ve kept largely quiet since around the end of October. Whatever I got sick with knocked me right out of commission for the better part of November, and kept me from being terribly productive through into December. Only yesterday did I really feel I was ready with some of the projects I’m working on that were literally due today; the most prominent one (being the launch of Frangible Time over at Linguankery) was in essence a compromise, given that I still have yet to finish the story (but am planning on doing so– I just have until July now instead of a packed holiday season). I feel bad about it, but I have to let go of some of my perfectionist tendencies. Not all of them– I still have to take pride in my work– but I have to understand when I’ve reached a physical or mental limit.

The past two years, either on the old (now defunct) TFO.net or on this blog, I made promises at the beginning of the year to do daily posts, to reprise my fairly good run from 2007. Needless to say I didn’t live up to it. Still, I am again making that effort, and hopefully I can hold myself to it. The biggest hurdle will be preventing myself from posting “nothing new” or “I’ll have a big post tomorrow”, because having those kinds of posts being up just discourages me. What I should be doing is encouraging myself to post something creative every day. It’s not like I’m not a creative person. Just fantastically lazy.

I still intend to be pro-actively lazy, though; my challenge to finish fifty games in 2010 still stands and starts… oh, now. What’s got me a little more psyched for this is the fact that I really think I might even be able to pull off yet another Gamerscore Double-up. It’s a pretty nifty goal to shoot for, given that I’d need 24690 points by the end of the year, but it’s not my primary goal. I’m making a change to the Game Clear rules for the 2010/50 challenge, though: I can count games I’ve cleared before if and only if I haven’t cleared them within the past five years, and the clear time on the save file is over twenty hours. That list obviously includes anything I’ve already claimed a Clear for in the three years I’ve been tracking them, and on top of that I’ve got to account for everything beaten in ’05 and ’06 as well. Funny thing is, I think I managed to post about those when I did them, but didn’t formally track them. I’d wager that there’s roughly 120 games off-limits to me… which is fine because I probably have easily that number on my stack.

That’s another thing. The first quarter of this year is positively rank with games coming out, most of them having elected to skip a head-on confrontation with Modern Warfare 2, Uncharted 2, and/or New Super Mario Wii. Thus, a bunch of games I was initially hyped up for are now being released in a period where I have to scale back my purchases, either for the sake of my shelving units or my wallet. I made up a list of what I consider my must-have games within the next three months, and came away with eight as a generous number and five as absolute will-not-misses (FF13, Pokemon SoulSilver, Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, Ace Attorney Miles Edgeworth, and Sakura Wars Special Edition, if you were wondering; just missing the cut, pending reviews, are White Knight Chronicles, Glory of Heracles, and Ragnarok DS).

I still have a Reclamation List, though that project’s revival is made both easier and harder based on the subject of the list: retro games! I’m planning on making 2010 the year I start reclaiming and re-collecting games I had for the pre-Playstation systems. For obvious reasons this is easier, because they’re less expensive and far easier to come by the vast majority of them (particularly because there happens to be a flea market right near my house, and a second game dealer has moved in there). Of course, it’s harder than the old one because not only are the games I had pretty damnably obscure, they’re obscure and old, meaning they’re going to be far harder to find at decent prices. 80% of them will likely run me a song. The remaining 20% will run me ragged; it already is, because my quest to find an Atari 7800 is fairly fruitless so far.

I’m also still going to write, code, and do the video podcasts here and there, so it’s not like I’m going to be sitting here on my thumbs all year. Once Frangible Time is done, I have a pretty hot idea for continuing the story set forth in A Civics Lesson; I have a zillion figures to assemble and paint before I have even the beginnings of one Warhammer 40K army; and then there’s the pesky business of mere survival.

Strap yourselves in, folks. 2010 is the year the accelerator makes contact with the alloy.

A couple of you have been aware of my nascent foray into miniature wargaming, specifically Warhammer 40,000. It’s a pricey hobby, but I believe that if it’s always going to be as relaxing as it was tonight– wherein I spent two hours just pulling pieces off of the plastic sprues and organizing them, with but one test gluing out of sheer enthusiasm– this might be one of the more pleasant uses of my time than I had initially suspected. It looks very daunting at first blush, and to be perfectly honest I was hesitant to start it up for fear of it taking more time than I have. In a way it probably still will: I have yet to even purchase paints. But assembling them is, surprisingly, a serene experience and one I’m interested in continuing.

Plus, once it’s all done, I’ll have an army of bloodthirsty Orks at my sole command. Serenity now, power trip later.

I made mention on the Twitter feed that “today is a weird day for gaming”. With Tokyo Game Show behind us, it’s hardly a surprise, but at the same time TGS this year was really, really low-key. No bombshells, no big reveals, nothing too shocking at all. That, in and of itself, is pretty damn unusual. About the only exciting news out of TGS was that Yakuza 3 was going to be released in North America, which excites people who are explicitly not me. Kotaku raised the point that the reason TGS was such a non-starter is because we saw all the big news a month ago at GamesCom in Germany… but honestly, we didn’t hear a whole hell of a lot back then, either. Maybe it’s the recession, maybe it’s gross mismanagement, maybe it’s the fact that the entire ’09 holiday season has been delayed to Q1 2010. We just don’t know.

Wow. 2010. I may have to pull out Crazy Taxi and hear Bad Religion talk about that mythical, far-off year of doom and gloom. Maybe not ten billion people, but enough troubles to go around for them. Anyway.

It’s not all bad, though. Capcom decided not to reveal Super Street Fighter IV at TGS this year, instead breaking the news last night. Eight fighters will be added to the already-impressive roster, including the often-overlooked T. Hawk and the new challenger Juri. Juri is already a part of the story, having been a supporting character in at least Hawk’s backstory (I think), but the other six fighters have yet to be named. Now, there’s a few things that make me a little bit giddy about this. While it certainly would have been nice for Capcom to let go of their “minor update, press a new disc” model and make Super a DLC pack, that just wasn’t gonna happen. The good news is, though, Capcom said they were not going to charge the full $60 for the standalone disc, though, which is good (I can hardly complain, though, having waited for the stars to align before snagging SF4 at nearly 1/3rd price from Gamefly anyway). More to the point, though, they announced that the existing fighters were going to be rebalanced. While I would love to read that as “Seth will no longer be an auto-blocking, cheap, defense- and damage-boosted pain in the ass at every difficulty level”, I have a hard time believing that they would make the final boss easier. This is Capcom, after all, who claimed that (Mega Man series creator) Kenji Inafune had a “jar of broken gamer spirits” on his desk. It is entirely believable that this is the unvarnished, godspoken truth. At least getting to Seth should be a less hellish prospect. As soon as there’s a date for this, I’ll probably be tossing a couple bucks on a pre-order.

Speaking of expansions, Dawn of War II is getting one that adds the Chaos Marines into the mix. I suppose if I had time, I’d spend a little while getting through the base DoW2 campaign… but then again, I never really had much in the way of fondness for the Space Marines. Give me the Imperial Guard or the Orks any day– hell, I’ll even settle for a Tau or Eldar campaign. I suppose I’m just gonna have to slog through FOR THE EMPEROR!.

I had the Blue Glow of Love this morning! However, it was not the Glow of Love, but the Glow of Mediocre And Meaningless Firmware Update. Now, I don’t have the Homebrew Channel currently installed on my Wii, mostly because I haven’t wanted much in the way of Wiibrew software. There just hasn’t been much of anything compelling. (Piracy, of course, is the complete opposite of compelling, in my eyes.) I don’t begrudge Nintendo the right to prevent piracy on their console, and I understand, on some level, the desire to protect users from potentially harmful applications that could trash a novice user’s Wii or siphon away personal data. Of course, no such malware apps yet exist and the Wii doesn’t store anything like credit card information, so that point is a little moot. I have to admit, my loyalties are torn here– like I said, I realize why Big N is doing this, but I also think that keeping the system open to legit homebrew while preventing piracy is a great idea. (It warmed my heart to see on WiiBrew.org that piracy bootloaders were broken, with the workaround being “Don’t pirate“.) There’s workarounds for legitimate hacks, and heaven smiles upon those who work tirelessly for the opening of the Wii, but I’m probably going to have to update soon, because the Shop Channel was updated as well.

Funny thing, though, I’ve been waiting for Cave Story Wii for a very long time now. Nicalis, the port developers working with the original game’s developer Pixel, have been promoting the game as “coming soon!” since about this time last year. That’s what the game’s growing hatedom would have you believe; in fact, it was a Nintendo press release that outed the game in October of 2008. Nicalis started the “coming soon” claims around this past spring, but delays and QA submissions to Nintendo have pushed the game into October of ’09 (at the earliest). Here’s the funny thing: people who have said that they were waiting excitedly for the game back in May, are now saying they won’t get it solely because of the delays. The Nicalis forums are a cesspool of hatred and vitriol, where once they seemed like such a nice place. I hate to stereotype people based on their posts in a forum, but it seems to me that none of the people moaning the loudest can be older than about 15. That means they were around 6 or so in 2000/2001, when Working Designs was at their height and Lunar 2 received repeated and increasingly ludicrous delays. Victor Ireland, love him or hate him, said it best: “Delays are temporary. Mediocrity is forever.” While there’s something to be said for punctuality, the simple fact is that Cave Story is a good game, and bringing it to a greater audience, no matter how long it takes, is worth the wait.

I needed to get that off my chest, really. It’s been bugging me. So, with a loud and triumphant “HUZZAH!!“, let’s move on to the next topic.

No, really, you need to say it before I continue. It’ll make you feel better. I promise.

Studio Ghibli is known for a lot of things, a great many of them cute. Level-5 is also known for a lot of things, primary among them Professor Layton and Jeanne d’Arc. So when you combine the two, you get Ni no Kuni (“The Another World”), an RPG that just. Looks. Awesome. The screenshots are impressive, the frames of the animated scenes are also well-done, and to be honest this may be the first game I make an effort to play through in Japanese before the English release. No English release has been announced, though, which makes me all the more driven to get my hands on it once it comes out. I would say that Nintendo has to realize that the game would make up its localization costs, but then again North America didn’t get Soma Bringer, so yeah.

It puzzles me, though, that with the increasing interplay between the North America and Japan regions, more games aren’t being produced for both zones. Going back to Kenji Inafune, he declared, “Man, Japan is over. We’re done. Our game industry is finished.” He then mentioned, in (what could, in some perverse mirror universe, be described as) his defense, that his latest game, Dead Rising 2, was being developed by a Canadian house (Blue Castle Games, out of Vancouver). I’m not going to say that the East or the West does games better; that’s a silly and stupid assertion to make, and besides, I’ve had a hell of a lot of fun with the Rock Band titles, games that have absolutely no trace of Japan in the– wait, no, there’s that X Japan DLC track (which is awesome). Both regions make some damn good games, and it stands to reason that gamers of both regions should have a shot at playing them. The PS3 merging the two into the same region is a good first step (assuming that there was anything I really wanted to play on the PS3 that hasn’t already been announced for NA). I would hope that the other two players in the industry follow suit and announce that their next consoles (probably in late 2011 or 2012) do away with region encoding.

Of course, then you get into the territorial pissing matches of multi-platform releases. It’s been pretty much a universally lauded fact that Final Fantasy XIII is coming to the Xbox 360 as well as the PS3. However, some folks don’t much care for this spreading of the wealth. Fanboys, I know, right? Well, it would be that easy to dismiss it as such if the disaffected group in question did not include Tetsuya Nomura, aka the guy who’s kind of a big deal with regards to the FF series. Reportedly, he was not told in advance that 13 was going multi-platform, and reportedly he was not happy about it. It’s also probably why FF Versus XIII, the side-story to the main game, is remaining PS3-only (for now– that may change, as details are still scarce on it). Finally, Final Fantasy XIV, the MMO crudely referred to as Final Fantasy XI-2 by nobody but yours truly, is still PS3 and PC-only, but that’s mostly (according to, yes, more rumors) because of Microsoft’s reluctance to allow paid MMOs on Live. Yeah, FFXI is already on Live, but that was a bend-over-backwards effort on MS’s part (as well as Square-Enix’s). I don’t doubt that there’s a chance we’ll see 14 on the 360 at some point, particularly if sales of the 360 version of 13 are significant enough to warrant it. Which I kinda think they might be. We’ll see in six to ten months.

I guess you need another “Huzzah” to muster up some good cheer before the last paragraph, huh? Go ahead, I’ll keep.

There are some things that I just should not do. Playing word games is damn near the top of this list. It’s not because of anything inherently harmful in them; quite the contrary, they are excellent ways to build up one’s vocabulary and quick-thinking skills. The critical issue comes when you realize that I love big words. You might say that I’m predisposed to extemporaneously suffusing my dialogues with prodigious pronunciations of apocryphal etymological artifacts. See? The latest game driving me to mainline Webster’s while eight-balling Roget’s and Oxford is Word Ace, which has the bonus of also inducing habitual gambling. The game plays like a cross between Scrabble and Texas Hold ‘Em: Players are dealt two letters, each with a score value, and bet chips (non-monetary; the game is free to play) as in poker. Five community cards are then dealt, again following the Hold ‘Em mode, and at the end of the hand the player whose word scores the highest takes the pot. It sounds silly. It is, in fact, very good. If you have even the slightest inclination towards language and the like, this game will consume your every waking moment. I had to eventually remove Word Wrap from my phone, because it was starting to really drive me nuts. Word Ace is most likely not coming off for a while. I just wish it would add “look into booking padded room” to my to-do list for me.

Catch you folks later.

(Before you ask: I slept better last night, but not perfectly. Tonight should be short but better, and then tomorrow night will be as close to perfect as I’m likely to get, I think.)

I kept this relatively quiet at the time, but around the end of April I picked up the “starter set” for Warhammer 40,000, called “Assault on Black Reach”. This was partly the fault of TV Tropes’ incessant pimping of the game, partly due to an attraction to the fluff, and partly due to the fact that I like da Orks. Orks is green an’ Orks is big an’ Orks is always ‘ard, an’ dey kin stomp da oomies wheneva, wereva. As you can see, the Orks’ particular mindset is… infectious, to say the least.

I’ve yet to actually field the army due to the fact that Warhammer, like most miniatures games, is obscenely expensive. The Black Reach set cost $65, even after discounts through being a member of the club, and it only has enough figures to create the barest minimum fieldable squads for both the Orks and the Space Marines. Furthermore, the “big” units included for the Orks (Deffcoptas) aren’t quite what I’m looking for, as I’d be much happier with just a huge, greenskinned tidal wave of rage swarming over the battlefield.

So, at GASP this past weekend, I looked into picking up some additional figures in order to make up the difference. They start at about $2 per figure, and armies sufficient for a legal match might have up to 100 units or more. In my case, “more” is the operative word since I’m eschewing the heavy artillery in favor of more or less Zerg Rushing. (Some lesser support units, in the Ork parlance: Gretchin, go for about $1.50 each.) The actual numbers crunched to make a legal army differ from faction to faction, and are standardized in faction-specific Codex books that run $25 each. I did mention that it’s in addition to a required rulebook that is itself $50, right? And that the units are seldom sold individually, instead in boxes of 10 or more? And that on top of all of that, units are pretty much expected to be painted, after you assemble them, sometimes with specialized tools? And as a final coup-de-grace, there are army carriers that can run $50 plus $20 per foam layer, so as to prevent damage to the miniatures?

I did say “expensive”. And that’s not why I’m complaining– in fact I’m more than happy to compensate Games Workshop by buying the legit gear when possible and plausible (as amiable as I am, there is no way in Hell I am going to pay a 150% premium for the GW-branded paints when similar or better ones are at the craft store just up the road from my house).

What bugs me is the idiotic way that Games Workshop has managed to “protect” the value of their goods. There are countless horror stories about the draconic controls that GW has placed on the stores that sell models and supplies. A certain percentage of the store’s floorplan must be devoted to their products, and they’re required to hold events (read: release parties and tournaments) at certain times of the year, even if that conflicts with a local club’s events. Ordering from GW is a convoluted process that requires a high-level degree in mathematics to figure out. And purchasing the minis online used to be impossible, because GW found that online sellers were pricing them at significant discounts off the retail value and quickly pulled the licenses of those sellers.

I say “used to be impossible” for a very good reason. Amazon, through its partners program, makes the ugly business of scouring the net for sellers willing to discount far simpler. I managed to find a set of Ork Boyz listed for $15– 40% off the labeled price. For ten Boyz, that’s not bad… multiply that by a few more, and you’ve got a less expensive route to having your own army. To add to the thrill, Amazon is too big for GW to raise a stink at, and there’s a fairly large pool of sellers who’ll offer discounts of varying amounts. Overall, it mitigates a significant portion of the high barrier to entry that the game has.

But it also illustrates an interesting point about capitalism. Even if you hold a monopoly on an item or resource, in this day and age you cannot completely control the end-to-end price points of the goods in question. The free market, or as free as it gets, is always governed by people, and sometimes people will break “the rules”. Nine times out of ten, that’s bad– see all the other cases of big companies screwing people just because they think they have the money to buy themselves out of trouble. But the one time out of ten that it’s good, the lucky or savvy consumer will take advantage of it ten times out of ten.

In all honesty, this isn’t just good for the consumer, it’s good for Games Workshop, too. Sure, they take a hit on the cost of their gear. But they also introduce a lot more people to the game; and like it or not, there will come a day when I’m at a game day or a GW event, and something will break or chip, and I’ll shell out for the expensive, proprietary-branded supplies to fix it (it’s just probability). Like I said, my problem isn’t that it’s expensive, it’s that it’s needlessly so, and that the steps taken to keep it that high are ultimately locking people out of a game that’s, in my opinion, kind of cool.

It’s all a moot point right now, as I’m not exactly in the green enough to go on a major Ork-buyin’ binge. For the time being, I’ll content myself with the books and the computer games. But, well, piecemeal is how these things are supposed to go anyway, I think. And the Ork Codex is on my list for this week.

I couldn’t resist, folks… I took advantage of the deal on Dawn of War II, which seems odd given my reticence against PC gaming in general. However, this is an RTS that plays altogether differently from others. No muckin’ about with bases, no complicated tech trees… jus’ waves an’ waves o’ green skin, comin’ atcha wif choppaz an’ shootaz. WAAAAGH!!

Er, ahem. I like it, and the Orks are a lot of fun to play. Plus it feeds into my Achievement addiction, so… yeah. That’s a plus and a minus right there, because, well… like I really needed a reason to play this game.