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Week in review: Week to 26 April
Had a picnic on Easter Sunday with all the family members who were currently in town, which was nice.
My haul from the weekend included an Easter Bilby and a small packet of gumballs. The latter was a gift from one of my siblings who knows I have not hitherto been a gum chewer but correctly predicted that I would be amused by the design of the packaging even if I had no use for the contents. It really was a small amount of gum, so I decided I might as well give it a try, and worked my way through it over the next couple of days. It was interesting: I usually have a tendency to have trouble concentrating on things without fidgeting, and chewing gum seemed to be sufficiently fidget-like to let me concentrate without doing anything else. I did, however, end up each time with a weird-tasting lump of plasticky goo to deal with, and I found that sufficiently off-putting that I don't think I'm going to acquire a gum habit.
At board game club, we had an all-afternoon session because of the public holiday, so we played two games that would normally be too long to play in an evening: Fury of Dracula and Mansions of Madness.
Fury of Dracula was fun, as usual. The player controlling Dracula on this occasion had not done it before, and made a few mistakes due to inexperience, but managed to rally and win the game. At one point, we had to do a deep dive in the rules to establish what order turn effects resolve in, because it meant the difference in whether Dracula, who was down to one hit point, would be able to apply some healing before losing that hit point as well.
Mansions of Madness, which I hadn't played before, is a game in the Arkham Horror/Elder Sign family of games inspired by the Cthulhu Mythos. In this one, the players collaborate to explore a mansion and deal with whatever sinister goings-on are going on. (In the scenario we played, it was a meeting of astronomers that had been subverted by a cult that wanted to perform a ritual when the Stars Were Right.) To increase replayability, the game is associated with a mobile app that runs the scenario for you, telling you how to lay out the various room tiles that make up the mansion, and what the villains and monsters do when it's their move, and the effects of random events. I'm not sure I liked that aspect of it; enough of the gameplay happened in the app that I was occasionally tempted to wonder why they hadn't just made it a computer game entirely. (There are computer games as well as board games in the family already; I used to play the app version of Elder Sign a lot - which meant I was frequently amused whenever the Mansions of Madness app emitted a sound effect or a bit of atmospheric background music that I recognised from the other game.)
Speaking of computer games (that are adaptations of tabletop games), this week I tried out a new computer game (a phrase which here means that it came out a few years back and I got it on special a couple of months ago): a strategy game called BattleTech, derived from the tabletop game of the same name, which revolves around designing giant nuclear-powered robots and then getting into fights with other people's giant nuclear-power robots.
I've been vaguely aware of the franchise (which now includes, in addition to several games, an extraordinary number of tie-in novels) since high school, when I knew a guy who was really into the original game, and I decided to give this new game a shot.
I'm not sure if I'm going to stick with it. There's a lot of number-juggling involved in both the mech-design and mech-battle parts of the game - designing the battlemechs involves a lot of complicated decisions about what kind of weapon to fit where on the chassis and making sure you're making the best use of the weight limit and so on, and the combat mechanic involves balancing weapon systems to avoid overheating and each part of the mech having its own separate hitpoints so that bits can fall off during the battle while the mech as a whole plows on. (The computer game has an achievement for taking both arms off an opponent in the same battle, titled with the apposite Monty Python quote.) From what I remember from high school, playing with all the fiddly little numbers was as much a part of the appeal as anything else for the people who were into the game, but I'm not getting my head around it. The only reason I've got as far as I have is that the story mode gives you a starter team with five mechs already designed and fitted out; I've been managing pretty well with those in the early missions, but I suspect I'm going to be in trouble when the difficulty ramps up to the point that I'll be required to upgrade the equipment with some actual understanding of what I'm doing.
The other side of the campaign mode is the story, and that's not really doing it for me either. At this point in my life, the setting - which has an elaborate and detailed future history spanning centuries to deliver the player to a point where "getting in a giant robot and fighting other people in giant robots" is a sustainable career choice - strikes me as not entirely sensible, and the specific plot feels kinda familiar. (It doesn't help that the player character is deliberately left as a blank so that the players can ascribe their own motives to him/her/them; the narrator of the opening spiel says, almost this directly, "I don't know whether you're in this for honor or principle or friendship or revenge or just for the money, that's up to you". Which is all well and good, but so far the rest of the story hasn't given me anything to spark off to inspire a decision about what my own player character's answer to that question is.)
Went to one of the Anzac Day morning services. The PA system was particularly bad this year; the people speaking at the podium fared okay, but the choir sometimes sounded like mournful ghosts wailing and squeaking unintelligibly in the distance. Which I suppose is not entirely inappropriate, but is not the effect they were aiming for.
There was a post going around on Tumblr inviting people to draw a horse without looking at any picture references, so I gave it a shot:
My haul from the weekend included an Easter Bilby and a small packet of gumballs. The latter was a gift from one of my siblings who knows I have not hitherto been a gum chewer but correctly predicted that I would be amused by the design of the packaging even if I had no use for the contents. It really was a small amount of gum, so I decided I might as well give it a try, and worked my way through it over the next couple of days. It was interesting: I usually have a tendency to have trouble concentrating on things without fidgeting, and chewing gum seemed to be sufficiently fidget-like to let me concentrate without doing anything else. I did, however, end up each time with a weird-tasting lump of plasticky goo to deal with, and I found that sufficiently off-putting that I don't think I'm going to acquire a gum habit.
At board game club, we had an all-afternoon session because of the public holiday, so we played two games that would normally be too long to play in an evening: Fury of Dracula and Mansions of Madness.
Fury of Dracula was fun, as usual. The player controlling Dracula on this occasion had not done it before, and made a few mistakes due to inexperience, but managed to rally and win the game. At one point, we had to do a deep dive in the rules to establish what order turn effects resolve in, because it meant the difference in whether Dracula, who was down to one hit point, would be able to apply some healing before losing that hit point as well.
Mansions of Madness, which I hadn't played before, is a game in the Arkham Horror/Elder Sign family of games inspired by the Cthulhu Mythos. In this one, the players collaborate to explore a mansion and deal with whatever sinister goings-on are going on. (In the scenario we played, it was a meeting of astronomers that had been subverted by a cult that wanted to perform a ritual when the Stars Were Right.) To increase replayability, the game is associated with a mobile app that runs the scenario for you, telling you how to lay out the various room tiles that make up the mansion, and what the villains and monsters do when it's their move, and the effects of random events. I'm not sure I liked that aspect of it; enough of the gameplay happened in the app that I was occasionally tempted to wonder why they hadn't just made it a computer game entirely. (There are computer games as well as board games in the family already; I used to play the app version of Elder Sign a lot - which meant I was frequently amused whenever the Mansions of Madness app emitted a sound effect or a bit of atmospheric background music that I recognised from the other game.)
Speaking of computer games (that are adaptations of tabletop games), this week I tried out a new computer game (a phrase which here means that it came out a few years back and I got it on special a couple of months ago): a strategy game called BattleTech, derived from the tabletop game of the same name, which revolves around designing giant nuclear-powered robots and then getting into fights with other people's giant nuclear-power robots.
I've been vaguely aware of the franchise (which now includes, in addition to several games, an extraordinary number of tie-in novels) since high school, when I knew a guy who was really into the original game, and I decided to give this new game a shot.
I'm not sure if I'm going to stick with it. There's a lot of number-juggling involved in both the mech-design and mech-battle parts of the game - designing the battlemechs involves a lot of complicated decisions about what kind of weapon to fit where on the chassis and making sure you're making the best use of the weight limit and so on, and the combat mechanic involves balancing weapon systems to avoid overheating and each part of the mech having its own separate hitpoints so that bits can fall off during the battle while the mech as a whole plows on. (The computer game has an achievement for taking both arms off an opponent in the same battle, titled with the apposite Monty Python quote.) From what I remember from high school, playing with all the fiddly little numbers was as much a part of the appeal as anything else for the people who were into the game, but I'm not getting my head around it. The only reason I've got as far as I have is that the story mode gives you a starter team with five mechs already designed and fitted out; I've been managing pretty well with those in the early missions, but I suspect I'm going to be in trouble when the difficulty ramps up to the point that I'll be required to upgrade the equipment with some actual understanding of what I'm doing.
The other side of the campaign mode is the story, and that's not really doing it for me either. At this point in my life, the setting - which has an elaborate and detailed future history spanning centuries to deliver the player to a point where "getting in a giant robot and fighting other people in giant robots" is a sustainable career choice - strikes me as not entirely sensible, and the specific plot feels kinda familiar. (It doesn't help that the player character is deliberately left as a blank so that the players can ascribe their own motives to him/her/them; the narrator of the opening spiel says, almost this directly, "I don't know whether you're in this for honor or principle or friendship or revenge or just for the money, that's up to you". Which is all well and good, but so far the rest of the story hasn't given me anything to spark off to inspire a decision about what my own player character's answer to that question is.)
Went to one of the Anzac Day morning services. The PA system was particularly bad this year; the people speaking at the podium fared okay, but the choir sometimes sounded like mournful ghosts wailing and squeaking unintelligibly in the distance. Which I suppose is not entirely inappropriate, but is not the effect they were aiming for.
There was a post going around on Tumblr inviting people to draw a horse without looking at any picture references, so I gave it a shot:
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