At this point, I’ve played enough tabletop RPGs to at least look like I know what I’m talking about to a non-player. I’ve discussed each of these systems in our weekly What did we play? entries, but I’ve decided to put my thoughts together more formally and look at each of them within the context of my larger experience in the medium. And specifically, I want to look deeper into how each system makes me feel when I play it.
Lancer
The central aesthetic idea of Lancer is that you’re a pilot of a giant mech getting into space battles, and it certainly works to make you feel like a large blunt object with a lot of cool abilities. One uses a d20 (a twenty-sided die) as a way of determining success or failure, and this is modified by d6s that are either added onto or taken away from the roll, depending on abilities and contexts; when one is behind soft cover, attacking enemies will roll a d6 and take that off the roll, for example. This is extremely simple combat compared to most RPGs I’ve played, and it’s what makes you feel, ironically, larger and tougher.
The key gameplay aspect of Lancer is how modular it is. The closest thing the game has to classes is models of your mech, and not only does each have a significant number of options of abilities, one can mix-and-match parts from other models as they level up (or gain ‘licence levels’, as the game calls it). The upshot is that it looks incredibly complicated but plays incredibly smoothly; one really does feel like a mechanic working on a vehicle inbetween combat and like a pilot of a big badass mech during. Players often feel very strongly as part of a team, quantifying their roles around each other as they solve puzzles.
Out-of-mech roleplaying is deliberately kept as simple as possible; skills are limited and usually almost arbitrary, encouraging you to stay in the mech as often as possible and for GMs to commit to mech battles. On the flipside, the lore of the game is very strongly tied into the gameplay – each model is developed by a larger organisation, and that organisation has history and design philosophy, and the enemies even moreso. Each individual ability is intimately tied to technology and the people who built it. One feels like part of a specific world within it.
Draw Steel
This is a very new RPG that I’m still learning how to play, but the basic design philosophy is already very obvious. For one thing, attacks never actually miss – one is simply rolling to see how effective the attack is. This is the central design philosophy; the player is intended to feel heroic and powerful. The other major element is Heroic Resources; each class in the game has a Resource that builds up over the course of a fight; for example, the Conduit, a holy warrior who gets their powers from praying to a god, gains Piety, which they spend on spells and abilities (including healing).
What effectively happens is that the player characters quickly build up resources over the course of a fight, and indeed are doing so by feeding off each other. In our game, I play as a Conduit who worships Nature and War spirits (currently, she’s not sure who it is she worships, but that’s a story decision the GM and I made), and one effect of this is that I gain Piety the first time someone delivers acid, cold, lightning, poison, or sonic damage within ten squares of me, as well as when someone within ten squares takes eleven points of damage. Another player happens to be playing a race that delivers lightning damage as a matter of course, and a class that deals in loads of damage, so you can imagine the joy we have playing off each other.
Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition
The greatest strength of this system is also its greatest weakness: it’s trying to be all things to all people. One tiny detail that summarizes its qualities is that the Medicine skill is associated with the Wisdom stat as opposed to Intelligence as seems intuitively logical, and it’s clear that the reason it’s like this is because Clerics are traditionally the healer of the group, and Clerics rely on Wisdom as their main stat for magic.
This is the central pillar of Dungeons & Dragons. Because it’s the original and biggest TTRPG on the market, it’s bound by both traditions and the need to be accessible, and this leaves a lot of gameplay details that flatly contradict each other. It’s my belief that the core gameplay of 5e tends towards modularity, with no classes and a lot of options; indeed, I experimented with modding 5e quite heavily to bring this out, and that aspect of it worked quite well.
At a certain point, classes become almost academic; between multiclassing (in which one takes levels in other classes) and feats, one can wonder what the point of the classes even is. Races are even moreso; the updated 2024 version of 5e seems to flatten races out even moreso, moving most of the core features of them over to ‘origins’, reducing race to a flavour rather than a major gameplay element.
This comes off to me as, if not a fear of alienating anyone, then at least an attempt to appeal to everyone ever. This reduces how special individual classes and races are, to an extent – not in that the game doesn’t hype you up, but in that there’s not much meaningful gameplay distinction between playing an 8 foot tall half-giant and a three foot tall gnome. The onus is on the player and the DM to bring creative meaning to that decision in the story; the gameplay doesn’t make you feel the difference the way Lancer makes you feel the difference between mech models.
This extends to the ridiculous scaling of the game. The first few levels leave you feeling quite fragile; starting about level ten, you effectively become unstoppable. This is especially notable in skills; you make a skill check by rolling a d20 and adding your points in the skill, which are a combination of the relevant stat modifier (for example, Acrobatics uses your Dexterity modifier) and, if you are ‘proficient’ in it, you proficiency bonus, a number that goes up as you level up. It’s very likely that, by level ten, you have at least +10 in one skill, making it so that you’ll only fail most skill checks if you roll a one (which is an autofail).
This extends to attacks and spells, and by the time you reach level ten (out of twenty, to be clear), you’ll have so many abilities that taking one’s turn can take an incredibly long time as you go over your abilities again to desperately see whatever’s relevant. Meanwhile, DMs can struggle to balance sessions, especially when players are starting to get ridiculously high. On the other hand… I end up missing this ridiculous scale when I’m away from the game. Most games are better balanced at level 1; I haven’t played Pathfinder enough to write it up here, but I do know it already makes you feel powerful at the first level.
But it can be frustrating getting deep into, say, Lancer and still not be rolling as many ridiculous dice or operating as, uh, operatic a scale as 5e D&D, where you’ll be fighting gods and armies if you keep going and going, striding about the world as an impossible genius. The upshot of 5e is that because it has little personality of its own beyond signifiers, it very much molds to the personality of the person running it, particularly because the lore and rules are so flexible.
Paranoia
A Saturday morning cartoon. One person I played this with criticized it as a game designed to make you feel incompetent, which captures what I find so fun about it. The gameplay is so simple that you’ll be doing almost no maths, and you’re given contradictory and often impossible goals that not only require you to act dangerously insane, they reward you heavily for it – when I played, I noticed that it was two people who were the most successful; the guy who took every problem completely seriously and tried to solve it to the best of his ability, and me, who launched himself into every problem with suicidal tenacity and no long-term thinking, cheerfully burning through nearly every life I was given.
Call Of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition
I’m still in very, very early days of playing with this, but it’s already clear that this is a game that encourages you to investigate. This has a much deeper skills system than anything else I’ve played; the player rolls a d100 attempting to roll below their percentage, and the lower the roll, the more successful they are. Some of the skills have a clear relationship to each other too that often factors into gameplay, like the size of the player that draws on a few different stats. On top of this is the Sanity score; a player makes a Sanity check upon witnessing a horror, and failure leads to a loss of Sanity. Losing all your Sanity leaves you incurably insane; losing too much in one go leaves you temporarily insane.
The end result is that you’re encouraged to solve problems, but at great risk to yourself. The aim of any game of CoC is to solve a mystery, but that mystery risks scarring you mentally; combat is possible but awkward and best avoided most of the time, and it’s really about using your skills to dig up the truth and make your way through as best you can. When you get to the end, you’ll come out with more knowledge but traumatised by those very facts; more capable of facing down the Cthulhu Mythos intellectually but not emotionally.
Interestingly, the game is also very clear about training its GMs – here called the Keeper – as well as the player. D&D is all about keeping one’s options open – telling you that you can do and prepare just about anything; Paranoia doesn’t seem to give advice but does attract a certain cruel sense of humour; Lancer doesn’t really give advice at all. CoC gives some advice, but it’s more that the specific structure of the game demands a Keeper that is willing to create a complex world with people moving through it, that the players will navigate and discover red herrings and clues and such until they find the mystery at its centre. So far, it’s one of the few TTRPGs I’ve looked at that really does that.
About the writer
Tristan J. Nankervis
Tristan J Nankervis (aka Drunk Napoleon) has been a writer, pop culture critic, dishwasher, standup comedian, waiter, potato cake factory worker, gamer, TV worker, and various other things. You can find him in Hobart, Tasmania.
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Department of
Conversation
The thing about D and D for me is that as hard as I try, I still find the rule set impenetrable. I’m playing for over four years and I still have to ask the the other players and the DM for help with “what exactly am I supposed to do?” I love the roleplaying but the game mechanics drive me batty. There is a reason that I was more into one-off LARPs for a long time. Those tend to be more freeform. Or at least the ones I have been part of are like that. D and D is never freeform. (Also – and this applies to a lot of RPGs – there is too much violence. I am at heart a pacifist. Maybe not in the political sense but certainly at a personal level. It’s been a struggle to be in games where players go hog wild with the violence and I just want deal with the situation and be done with it. Small wonder I play a character who’s more a healer than a fighter when I can.)
Depending on your taste for horror, you probably would enjoy Call of Cthulhu, where violence will almost certainly get you killed and is deeply traumatic otherwise, the aim is to save lives, and the rules can be learned in basically five minutes.
What Did We Watch?
Okay, I have to share this absolutely evil movie-watching process my mum’s boyfriend went through over the weekend. He turned the TV over to Evan Almighty. I was working at the table, and I think, okay, bad movie, but fine. Seven minutes in, he switches to the 2018 version of A Star Is Born, which is about fifteen minutes into the film. Three minutes later, he switches to QI, watching a full episode of that. Fine, comfortable, I can half-work while watching it. The 2002 I Spy comes on, he watches about forty minutes of that, then without warning switches to the last ten minutes of Evan Almighty. I was aghast.
Fight Club
Rewatched this with the boyfriend because they hadn’t seen it in years and were compelled by my take (and I, curious about their take on Marla, who they still find underwritten and ‘written by a man’). This is definitely a movie that reflects where I am in life; it takes remembering how I used to feel to sympathise with the deeply broken men in this movie, and out of all the characters, I see myself mainly in, uh, Tyler. I suppose the ideal is seeing oneself in the Narrator in the final minute.
That cinematic chopped salad is an atrocity!
So if I am reading this right, the boyfriend was watching all of these on TV, as in through various channels, right? Shit, that is normal! Channel surfing! Maybe this is the televisual equivalent of leaded gasoline for younger people but that is just how to watch shit on TV for me. At least and especially with the material listed, none of that rises into “stay with this to the end” level.
You have it correct, but I could not more strongly disagree. I channel surf when I’m looking for soemthing to watch, and then I pick something, and then I, you know, watch it. Just because a movie sucks doesn’t mean I’m going to disrespect it like that.
Ha, this is very weird to me. Evan Almighty is made to be disrespected like this! The TNT/AMC/TBS “basic cable” flick is absolutely a genre. But more to the point, the surfing of channels is about catching waves, when the commercial break for whatever you’re watching hits you look for better water. Nothing preventing you from going back at some point but why hang around right now?
Word.
Kids today, amiright?
I did use “You came at a very strange time in my life” on a friend recently (though not in a romantic context).
Live Music – three gigs in somewhat unusual surroundings.
Friday – the most normal of the three, but in a city I don’t visit often. Friend was playing with a couple of bands I’d seen before and it was a pretty good evening although the headline act succumbed to that “the people want an encore but we have no more songs so uh I guess we can repeat songs we already played?” thing which I’m never a fan of. Stick to your guns and leave ’em wanting more!
Saturday – a small local experimental / electronic record label held a “happening” in a church, four acts who covered the spectrum from folky to drony. Pretty good although as usual for church events the seating was extremely uncomfortable and the combination of warmth and mostly slow / drony music (and wine) made me quite sleepy.
Sunday – there was an acoustic gig in my actual bit of the city (which is a mining town that has gradually been pulled into the city limits, so not much happens here) so I thought I’d check it out. I knew one of the acts a little, the other two were quite traditional folk style but it was a nice afternoon.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “Revenge” – not much to add to Lauren’s article (and Simon’s comment) from last week but this was fun, I saw the twist coming but it’s still well executed and the chemistry between the two leads is great, they’re very cute together before it all goes wrong. Looking forward to more of this!
Wooo, live music x 3! I’m on your side about the encore repeats.
And woo, Alfred Hitchcock Presents! Glad you liked this. The very convincing happy beginning between the couple really does make it all more painful when it goes wrong.
Woooo live music! Booo repeat songs! I like an actual encore demand though, the best response if you’re out of songs is to beat out a cover — if it is not at the highest quality oh well, it’s an encore. I remember seeing Sons & Daughters back in the day and they had clearly played all their songs but we wanted more, so they knocked out a somewhat sloppy but very fun “Nice ‘n Sleazy” by the Stranglers, it ruled.
One of the songs they repeated was a cover! It would have been so easy to hold it back just in case! But yeah the demand was definitely there so I guess I can be a little lenient.
Woooooo live music!!
Woooooo live music!!
Woooooo live music!!
Glengarry Glen Ross – Sure, we saw the stage show a few weeks ago, and it wasn’t even terribly long ago we’d watched the movie, but for a lazy Sunday night, it was an easy choice because it’s just such a pleasure, in the acting, the dialogue, everything. It is funny after seeing the stage show how the film almost feels a little complicated by comparison – the stage show is two acts on two sets – three scenes in the Chinese restaurant the night of, and one scene in the office the morning after.
Also, as memorable as he is, and as quotable as his scene is, Blake is full of shit. As Grant observed, it’s not really about motivating the salesmen; it’s about further grinding down the losers, stubbing them out like cigars.
That said, we discussed on my Discord who would play Blake in the updated stage version, and I think (especially for the version we saw) Danny McBride was the slam-dunk best answer. His characters even have their own unique language and cadence, even if it’s not Mamet’s– but he could and would chew the fuck out of lines like “You think I am fucking with you? I am not fucking with you.” (He might become the first ever actor to add too many “fuck”s to Mamet’s dialogue.)
Also, it’s very funny how, if you think for a second about it, Aaronow gets the steak knives and keeps his job.
Blake is there for pure intimidation, which is why Michael B. Jordan would also be a great candidate for the part. This is an excellent point I’ve never seen in analysis, Aaronow might be a dummy (“Why are you doing this to me, George?” gets a huge laugh out of me) but he’s certainly not going to prison or losing his job!
Aaronow keeping his job makes his final line even funnier.
John Wick: Chapter 2
With commentary by We Hate Movies. I think this improves on the first film, getting more creative and varied with its violence and getting better action choreography in the process. Still ridiculous and comic-booky in a way I half-enjoy and half-roll my eyes at, but it has a great cast and moves along fairly well. And I got a kick out of the commentary.
Hundreds of Beavers
For Movie Club. This continues to delight–I have trouble discussing it without just turning the conversation into a list of all my favorite gags: the horse! The pole-dancing! Beaver Holmes and Watson! The gay rabbits! It was great to have the discussion highlight a lot of behind-the-scenes details about how the filming was actually accomplished and how they managed to do so much with so little funding. One of the key features here is how consistent the aesthetic is: this doesn’t look like any other movie, but it does always look like itself, with cartoon-y black circles for holes, fish that look like they’re made out of comfortable socks, adorable furry costumes, silent film expressiveness, and more. Agreed with everyone else in the discussion that the simple fact of this movie’s existence, let alone its success, gives me hope.
99 River Street
’50s crime film that mostly sticks to the One Crazy Night formula to very fun effect; more about this in this week’s Streaming Shuffle.
Michael Clayton
Fantastic film. (2007 has to at least be in the running for one of the best movie years ever, right?) I’ve seen this a couple times, but it’s always gripping and effective, with top-tier performances from Clooney, Swinton, Wilkinson, and Pollack. It feels like it could be a Scott Turow novel, but it’s just a little too sleek (and not Southern enough)–but that sense of weary cynicism and the question of whether or not one particular lawyer can recapture his soul or not is the same. The scene with the horses is beautiful, a kind of natural grace in the environment that U/North is steadily poisoning; the final confrontation between Clooney and Swinton is electric.
I will say that as many times as I’ve seen this, I always forget that there’s a fair amount of screentime devoted to Michael Clayton’s relationship with his siblings, especially his alcoholic brother. We’ll see if writing this down helps me remember this subplot’s existence for next time.
The horse from Hundreds of Beavers is definitely one of my picks for Funniest Things In Movies.
The horse really hits the comedic trifecta: being the only animal with a human face showing, keeping that slack-jawed look the whole time, and having the moment where the trapper tries to clamber up for a ride. I can’t even think about that last part without laughing.
The rabbit snow angles gag in Beavers is hilariously grim at the end. Such a fun movie, I did not get around to Double Featuring 2024 this year but I’ve had something stewing with this and Megalopolis in the back of my brain for a while — digitized industrialization, independently shot and unencumbered by those who would cut back on the madness, one a valedictory and the other its true inheritor of The Future for good and ill.
“Adam Driver, in order to marry my daughter you must… bring me… Hundreds of Megalons!”
“Go back to the daaaaaaaaaam”
“I’m Shiva, the god of death.” Fuck yeah, Michael Clayton.
One amazing detail among many in Hundreds of Beavers is the lawyer beaver near the end who pats his client’s hand sympathetically, there is an order here the trappers don’t actually possess.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story – Yeah, like everyone else the only way we could wrap up Andor is here. And having watched Andor and seeing how well the character arcs unfolded and the bests proceeded, the flaws of Rogue One are brought into relief. Next to the complex development of Cassian from outsider to rebel, Jyn Erso’s path is just too simple. And a lot of the movie is okay but not very good. Until the battle begins at Scarif (which might also where Tony Gilroy’s reshoots and new script begin as well). And then we get this killer third act. It’s really nice for a movie to end better than it started.
The Practice, last two episodes of first season – I discussed a key element at Captain’s Log before watching the season finale, and have to add that despite a good faith (so to speak) effort to address matters of religion and secular law, the finale fumbles the ball. Maybe because this is the first episode not written by David E. Kelley. But also maybe because the deck is stacked so that the grieving father turned vengeful is found not guilty. Norman Lloyd played the DA with rabbinic ordination and doesn’t play it with much subtlety. (The best guest here is Philip Baker Hall as the judge.) There’s also a subplot about a teen accused of statutory rape but hey, it’s okay, he’s going to marry the 14 year old he knocked up and be a good father! As much as I like this show, such subplots that run 30 minutes around bigger events are going to be a regular thing.
MASH, “White Gold” – Another rabbi, a chaplain named Goldberg. Or at least Father Mulcahy thinks that is the case. Everyone else knows it’s Colonel Flagg, there to steal penicillin? This one makes no sense. Funny as some points because of Flagg, but it’s nonsense. Also, to slow down Flagg, Hawkeye and Trapper perform an unnecessary appendectomy. Totally played for laughs. Somewhere down the line Hawkeye does this again to slow down a commanding officer sending too many men to their deaths, and BJ refuses to help. I wonder if when this was written someone noted the surgery was immoral and kept that in mind for years later.
Frasier, “The Zoo Story”/”The Maris Counselor” – In the former, Frasier hired a new agent who is much nicer and much less competent than Bebe, and who comes up with a hare-brained scheme to get a new crane at the local zoo renamed Frasier Crane. Some funny bits, though this was designed mainly to get Frasier to rehire his amoral former agent Bebe. The latter sees Maris start an affair with the marriage counselor supposedly working to fix things (Bob Dishy), and at long last the final straw for Niles, who goes so far as to fling his wedding band off the balcony. This one ends with the three Crane men lamenting their state of their love lives and making common cause. It helps now to know all three find love again someday, but it’s kind of heartbreaking in the moment.
Niles and the counselor mixing things up in the bed is a classic bit of farce, as is Niles almost going back into patient mode before recovering.
We are now entering farce country as The Ski Lodge and Room Service are next.
“It’s really nice for a movie to end better than it started” — so much of the love for Rogue One comes down to this, I think. A huge chunk of this is sloppy as hell and Jyn is a dweeb, but god damn does that ending go out on an incredibly high level for an entire 30 minutes or so, so it’s hard not to leave the movie with good thoughts.
Re M*A*S*H: apparently, the faked appendectomy was just the show accidentally recycling itself, but Mike Farrell objected heavily to the idea that BJ would go along with an unnecessary surgery, and not only did his passion over this lead to the rewrite, much of the arguments between Hawkeye and BJ were lifted verbatim from arguments between Alda and Farrell.
Gun Crazy – The Solute/MM pay off again, thanks Ploughman! Very good B-movie noir, especially Peggy Cummins’ (for 1950) unusually aroused, hungry performance and the famous long take where Dall’s hope for parking was apparently unscripted. The mix here of the sexist femme fatale and Bart’s love of merely HAVING guns – not killing things, but shooting and possessing these weapons – is thematically fascinating compared to most noirs, Laurie technically drags him into this (can’t trust them dames!) but it’s like she unlocks something inside he doesn’t want to acknowledge. This and Angel Face feel like early Lynch keys in their raw power and style. Expiring on Criterion at the end of the month.
Gun Crazy is so terrific. “Raw power” is spot-on–Cummins and Dall are just electric here.
Hell yeah Gun Crazy. The heist gets all the attention and it should, but I really like the hallucinatory ending — it feels directly responsible for the vibe Jim Thompson was going for in The Getaway.
Cummins’ drawn brow gets smeary with sweat and I don’t think most 50’s movies would let female actors in their twenties look that human or messy. Bonnie and Clyde was a direct inspiration for the story and The Getaway is the most nightmarish version of that scenario, this is only a rung below.
Glad you enjoyed this! Joseph H. Lewis is the real deal – great noirs with a premise twisted about 45 degrees off from the usual (in this case as you point out, the protagonist is a guy who wants to possess and enjoy guns but doesn’t want to endorse the violent side of that culture, paging about half my cousins). It doesn’t come around quite as often, but catch up with My Name is Julia Ross if you can.
GUN CRAZY feels like the uber-text for handling the obsessions of the American character, and its basic formula is surprisingly adaptable across varying cultural contexts and situations. As I mentioned I saw PALE FLOWER, a Japanese yakuza film from 1964 last week, and GC’s DNA was all over it
This and Repo Man, Pulp Fiction, and 12 Years A Slave are probably in the mix if I had to explain American culture to aliens.
“So, your culture is to stuff our desecrated corpses in a trunk and drive around greater Los Angeles?”
“No, that’s not what I –”
*INDEPENDENCE DAY DEATH BEAM*
Children Of Men — ugh, way too many long takes. Haven’t seen it in years and I had forgotten how much hatred of immigrants drives the plot (and what is a baby but a new arrival to a strange place, hmmm) and it was bracing back then and sure is bracing as fuck now. Owen is the damn man throughout, hard picture someone else playing the Bogartian weary decency necessary for the character, the movie makes a lot of hay out of the revolutionaries being dipshits (and holy shit, Charlie Hunnam! Had no idea that was him) and is not wrong but it edges up to some both-sides stuff in that regard so Owen is needed to sell the “middle” ground. Although I found a certain grim humor in a hot take idea that he totally blows up the coffee shop in the beginning, pretty CONVENIENT that he got out just in time amirite? And kidding aside, the long take stuff is excellent, I had forgotten the jumpstarting one and that is superb tension. The movie is steeped in Global War On Terror horror and it is both matter of fact and furious about this, this is not “a warning” or “prescient” or whatever sci-fi gets tagged with, just the language we know. And not that it worked as a warning anyway.
Repo Man — an Independence Day tradition (getting fucking loaded and watching Repo Man) returns! Robby Muller, you fucking king — the light here is unforgiving but not sterile and the lines of color in the sky look amazing. As always, had the realization that I am Bud behind the wheel, need to do better in that regard. Still the greatest movie of all time, still utter transcendence at the end.
Babylon 5 — end of Season 2, something happens that was bound to happen and unfortunately happens in one of the lamer ways it could happen, oh well. On the plus side, someone we hated dies horribly and does so in a Jar Jar Binks-level fuckup for the larger galaxy, what a fucking dope! Ha ha! So there is hope heading into Season 3.
“ugh, way too many long takes”
So all this time you’ve been Mike D’Angelo in disguise?
This and when they were snarking on Alan Moore for very reasonable complaints about the movie adaptations are the most I ever turned on Old School AV Club.
Hmmm I give this comment 57/100.
I actually liked that piece! I think our own Ploughman got it right here — https://www.the-solute.com/the-long-takes-of-children-of-men/– the theory D’Angelo goes off on is correct but the COM example is the wrong choice. But the pushback on the article was like D’Angelo had insulted everyone’s mothers instead of their oners.
Disclosure – What a horrible hoot. A soft-sleaze ‘90s Chrichton reverse-sexual harassment thriller that could be seen today as an incel’s nightmare – predatory women coming after you and your family. Michael Douglas being uncomfortable during his encounter with Demi Moore or squirming at having to say “penis” in front of his wife and lawyer is completely unbelievable. Ennio Morricone’s score injects a bit of his classic giallo work raising the sleaziness a little bit more. I remember this making a ton of money at the time with all the titillating sex talk, like at the mediation. The VR filing room looks ridiculous now with it’s cumbersome hardware and early cg graphics. Also, Douglas’ dream in the elevator with Donald Sutherland is homophobic as hell but rivals Sutherland’s scare in Body Snatchers. It has that long 90s thriller runtime but I was never bored.
What Did We Play?
Strahd resumed, with out DM still getting over a very long running cold that her GP determined is not COVID or anything else of note. (I know now four people who had such a cold, usually leading to sinus infections.) Thankfully, she was in good voice. And thankfully, the three additional druids we needed to face didn’t kill us. Unfortunately, we needed to kill them. (That comment I made about D and D and violence? This is why I was thinking of it. We’ve been killing monsters the whole time but this is the first time we killed humans.) I think next time around we are out of things to face down in the current scene, but who knows?
Had another Rematch session with friends last night, I have now purchased a cheap headset so I could join in with the chat. It’s a really fun game and I feel like I’m getting a LITTLE better at it, also it really helps playing with like-minded friends rather than the random matchmaking where you usually end up with one player who is trying to win the game on their own (and largely failing because, huh, teamwork is effective actually, who knew?) – it’s intense and I would like to celebrate my personal development in logging off a good 90 minutes before bedtime to give myself some time to wind down (not that it really worked, fucking sleep).
Almost (I think) all the way through Donut County. Funny and cute with both of these things sometimes undone by being cute-sy, with about 50% more effort this could have been an actual puzzle game and not just an unusual and amusing time waster. Point of order for the game’s summary on the Steam website: you do not actually play as a sentient hole, that would be silly. You play as a donut shop-owning raccoon using an app on his tablet to drive a movable hole around delivery customers in an effort to get enough XP to purchase a quadcopter.
I felt the same about this, it’s charming and fun but doesn’t quite get as far as making the central premise satisfying or developing it much as the game goes on. But I quite like a short, quirky gaming experience from time to time and it definitely scratched that itch.
Replayed part of Unpacking. I was fond of this the first time I played it–it’s a low-key, vaguely puzzle-like game where you follow a young woman through childhood and into adulthood, learning about her life as you unpack her things in a series of rooms (childhood bedroom, college dorm, first apartment with friends, first apartment with an unsuitable boyfriend, back home, new solo place, moving in her girlfriend, buying the first house as a couple). It’s nice to see the implied storytelling of her interests developing and to see what hangs around between moves and what doesn’t (her obviously beloved stuffed pig makes it every time, although it’s been mended multiple times by the end); similarly, there’s some storytelling-through-gameplay via how hard it is to find space for your stuff in the boyfriend’s glossy tech-guy apartment, and in the end, the only place you can stash your diploma is under the bed. But I have to admit I’ve never found that last part that effective, because I don’t know where my diploma is anyway. It might be in a box somewhere. Admittedly, the girlfriend is way more to my tastes: she has cute dresses, Jaws, and a Creature from the Black Lagoon head. Good pull, Unpacking girl!
But this just does not stand up to a replay for me at all, even though I don’t mind ultra-low-key stuff like this and wanted it mostly as a podcast game. After a while, it just started to feel as frustrating as regular unpacking, and just let me put this thing on top of that other thing, dammit. I made it all the way to the house, and you know what, that house is too big. These are young professionals. Fucking downsize so I don’t have to unpack fiddly little shit in this many rooms.
I really wanted the storytelling to go a little deeper in this, I enjoyed going through it once well enough but yeah the unpacking itself isn’t really satisfying enough on its own and the little storytelling moments are kinda clever but then it’s just over. Really nice visual style and music though.
X-Men: Children of the Atom – Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics on Nintendo Switch
Finally beat it. I swapped to Cyclops for the Magneto fight, spammed optic blast from range, played defense then got multiple hits with the uppercut whenever there was an opening. Good game, excellent visual design, busted enemy AI like in most MvC games. Still remarkable that they got such a singular game from Marvel on the first try, and this at the time when Capcom was cranking out new fighting games every single year.
And with that now I’ve beaten every game in the Marvel vs Capcom collection. X-Men was definitely the toughest one, which doesn’t surprise since it’s a one-on-one fighter and doesn’t have the wacky breaks of, say, Marvel Super Heroes.
At this point my MvC ranking goes:
1. Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes
2. Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes
3. Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter
4. Marvel Super Heroes
5. X-Men: Children of the Atom
6. X-Men vs. Street Fighter
They’re all very good to excellent. Also, The Punisher is one of the top Capcom beat ’em ups.
Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes; Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes – Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics on Nintendo Switch
Played some casual rounds online, won a few rounds even. Managed to avoid some of Marvel vs. Capcom 2‘s infamous busted players but I still saw a few, even on casual. Will definitely play some more.
Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike – Fight for the Future; Street Fighter Alpha; Street Fighter II: The World Warrior – Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection on Nintendo Switch
ACA NEOGEO THE KING OF FIGHTERS ’98 on Nintendo Switch
Played a few rounds on arcade mode. It’s nearly impossible to find online games for the Street Fighter games on Switch (and this KOF version doesn’t offer them at all), but I don’t mind, as I’ve nearly always played them solo. Love how different these feel from the Marvel games. Superficially they’re the same but there’s dozens of different little things under the surface that make a huge difference. The first Street Fighter II in particular feels humble in comparison but no less fun, and even KOF ’98‘s take on three-on-three feels discreet after the lunacy of the Marvel games.
Ridge Racer 64 – Nintendo 64 – Nintendo Classics on Nintendo Switch
Played a few rounds. Didn’t fall in love but there’s an interesting take on racing here, all about cornering and drifting. Might return later.
F-Zero 99 on Nintendo Switch Online
Played a few cups and rounds. Did rather well, though I also got at least one tough-to-accept crash out. They made a Mirror track for Silence II and it’s beyond absurd. It’s one thing for tracks to be tough to race in, it’s another for the game to force you to jump around the track entirely.
Took a break from my Shining Force CD playthrough to play a little Axiom Verge, ’cause I was feeling like some Metroidvania type gaming, I didn’t feel like learning anything new, and I’d been thinking about the game and its story (and Tom Happ’s ideas) again. Still a fun game, and it’s funny how much I can remember instinctively about what to do and where to find stuff even though I haven’t played it in like three years.
Just confirming that I am setting up a Happy Hour for tomorrow night at 5pm Pacific Time. Let me know if you can show up either here or at my email: [email protected]. Use the latter if you are new here and I don’t have an email address for you for the zoom link.
See ya there.
I will be there!
I’ve never liked playing high level D&D campaigns. Like you mention characters are indestructible, player turns take too long with the game mechanics becoming more complex and filled with number crunching. Low level adventures are much more fun. They get everyone at the table involved and I like playing with new players. There is a bigger sense of wonder without two or three people dominating the game and taking up time. But as I’ve gotten older CoC is something I’ve been getting into more. The story and mystery are much more emphasized. The published scenarios are better written. No, there isn’t a lot of action or combat with the mystery at the forefront. But if you do want more action and combat Pulp Cthulhu is an easy incorporation. Unlike D&D it’s much more friendly to first-time players. Also, there is always a challenge unlike high level D&D.
I feel like they should have tossed the word ‘race’ from D&D ages ago and replaced it with ‘species’ or some new term, because you don’t, actually, want to say that some races are smarter than others, that’s not good, but it’s perfectly fine to say giants can be taller than halflings. There’s always going to be some uneasiness with assigning inherent natures to human-like creatures, but they’ve kind of stuck themselves in this issue at this point.
I think you’d like the 2024 redo, because while it still has races, it gives the stat increase aspect over to ‘origins’. So it’s the fact that you grew up as a farmer or a scribe or whatever that makes you tough or smart, while it’s more that Goliaths are tall and have the ability to endure damage while Halflings are short and have innate luck.