deanb

Legendary: Marvel Deck Building Game (or just "Marvel Legendary") I think we also had one of the expansions. So first the bad: the artwork is pretty much the same for every card in a deck. Except for some of the henchmen decks. Decades of artwork to pick from and it's the same throughout. The second bad, though not really the games fault, is if you're starting out don't go up against the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (And they were just Henchmen, we didn't even touch Doctor Doom as the Mastermind). So yeah our first game was pretty crippling. But we started early so got through a second game easy (and some Pathfinder card game too, with a bit of Pathfinder PnP planning) (not my image) Basic game mechanics are there's a villains deck and a heroes deck. At the start of the game you pick a variety of villains to fight (e.g Brotherhood of Mutants, Hydra, Enemies of Asgard, Doombots, Savage Land Mutates etc), and a variety of heroes (e.g Prof X, Nick Fury, Hulk, Thor, Blade etc). These get put into decks together. Then a Mastermind and a Scheme/Scenario(?) are chosen. Scenario dictates the win condition (the first was Negative Zone breakout so once 12 villains had crossed the board through the City and escaped you lost), and Mastermind dictates some fancy features that didn't matter for most of the game(so I don't know them to be able to explain). You start the game with a few Shield grunts and agents. Agents let you buy stuff (you may see a star with a number on next to Maria Hill), and grunts attack (not clear, but it's on most those hero cards there's claws). Your initial deck can't do much(one buying and one attack for each) so you'd buy heroes (see the coin with numbers on, eg that Wolverine is his legendary card, costing 8, and Spider-man is cheap costing 2). As the game progresses you'll end up with much more flexibility in your deck for buying and attacking, even better with cards that can work together. Which is a biggy on why we fucked up on the first game. First game we picked whoever sounded cool, picking a hero each to put into the Hero Deck. I picked Deadpool, biggest fuckup was Prof X. Prof X had a lot of abilities that required Xmen cards. He was the only one in play. Whereas second game we had a more Avengers Assembled themed game. Mastermind was Loki, and heroes were Cap, Thor, Hulk, Black Widow and Hawkeye (We'd had Iron Man in previous game). Drew and I had realised that the Thor and Hulk cards worked very well together (the more green fist cards you played in a turn the more Hulk did, to the end point causing 10 damage with his Legendary card + whatever other attack cards you put down. Thor also got more buying power with green fists, letting you buy more and hit harder and harder as game progressed). I imagine as we'll play it more it'll be easier to figure out what kinds of heroes play well with each other. We also found it was good to have Hand Ninjas and Savage Land lot in villains; easy to defeat and beneficial to do so (a lot of villains/henchmen cause damage when you beat them. Horsemen especially liked to KO your cards.) Oh yeah, you draw up 6 at end of turn, you have to play all 6 in your turn. So you might have a lot of wasted cards early on(e.g villains are usually 3hp+ but you might only have two Shield grunts with 1 attack each), but as you play you'll get cards that let you draw up more during play. My housemate and her BF were playing this other night and my housemate had to draw and play so many from her combo she had to reshuffle discard back into deck to be able to play enough cards in her turn. Oh yeah, KO is cards gone for good. Your discard pile is pretty much your future deck cos you'll be burning through your own deck quite frequently and need to reshuffle your discard. You only start with 12 cards, draw 6 per turn, you do the maths. It's certainly a fun game to play, especially since we're all into our Marvel/X-men stuff (which as noted on the above with Discworld*, theme games can be hit or miss depending on how many fans there are). I think we'll be playing it many times again in future. It's also pretty small too, certainly a bonus over other games. *Played Discworld again this weekend too, while housemate n her BF played Marvel. This time I had two Discworld fans to play with, so they actually knew the who and the where's. Only real issue was trying to explain that a card with a building on (e.g "the Dysk theatre") isn't the actual building you're placing (which would actually be "The Shades"). So folks were thinking that the text on the card was the bonus of the building for each turn.

I see you posting these pictures all over my twitter feed and goddamit is it a pretty looking game. But I must be strong.

Picked up The Room in easter sale. The first of what is likely to be a growing collection of paid Play games (Wooh, free store credit).

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/18/are-atheists-the-new-mormons.html

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2014/04/16/ps4-hits-7-million-globally/ 7 million units in 6 months. Now to wait and see what MS have to say about Xbox One.

http://www.therestartpage.com/ Pretty sure this counts to be here. I only know a few of them

http://store.steampowered.com/app/292060 In a grand stroke of Genius, while Titanfall is on Origin (for obvious reasons), Geoff Kieghley has put the "Final Hours" interactive book documentary thing on Steam.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/10/sharing-joysticks-how-video-games-are-opening-up-to-lgbt-themes This has been sat in my pocket for a while, figured I'd share.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-27038723 UK and North Korea relations have been...hair raising lately.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/04/introducing-steam-gauge-ars-reveals-steams-most-popular-games/ Ars have done a big huge breakdown of Steam games on hours played, amount of games played/unplayed, and so on so forth. It does have a few bits of flaws in the data (the biggy being that it's using the hours played stat which only came into action 5 years ago, pretty much skewing the stats heavily for any games older than that), but it gives a pretty decent overview. Also Beyond Earth really comes across as a no brainer with those stats.

Lego Marvel Super Heroes. Better be good HotHeart.

Ohh if Origins is only £6 I may have to grab that. Any particular deal to do it?

http://www.mtv.com/videos/movies/1030842/x-men-days-of-future-past-exclusive-opening-battle.jhtml Bit of the opening battle of DofP

"lol" (I swear I had a better version of this bookmarked somewhere)

http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/04/12/civilization-beyond-earth-interview-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-new-factions-aliens-technology-and-more/ PC Gamer have done an interview with lead designers. All quite interesting stuff, not quite just "Civ in space" that's for sure. Does seem to be unashamedly following the Alpha Centauri heritage quite closely too. I quite like the sound of the technology web, always felt it kind of sucked that regardless of playstyle, with Civ you always followed much the same tech route just which you went on first really. Was nice with Endless Space to have a four pronged tech tree that could benefit certain play styles (though there was some overlap)

Riddick Watched this with my Dad (step-mum left early on to watch Ghost in other room). I thought my dad had seen the previous two, turns out not, but he might be interested in giving them a shot. The main draw for him watching this is he's a Fast n Furious fan, so knew of Vin Diesel. T'was pretty good, at least from my perspective. Probably took a bit too long on the set-up if you're not someone aware it's the 3rd film and were going in as if it was a new film. People don't turn up for nearly half the film. Seeing Riddick become un-"civilized" is all kinds of cool though for long term fans. My main issue would be if you've not seen Pitch Black recent enough to remember in some semblance of detail then chunks of the dialogue will be a bit "huh?". Also for the most part it is very much Pitch Black, though it mostly just seems to be a case of Diesel trying to bring the series back to it's (better performing at cinema) roots a bit before diving into the Necromonger/Underverse lore that Chronicles introduced. Other film I watched was Iron Giant. I hadn't seen it previously though I've always heard good praise for it. Certainly a rather well done film. I like the animation style, very much the kind I remember as a kid in the not-Disney films of youth like Rats of NIMH, All Dogs Go to Heaven types. Those films that gave a bit of a spook and lesson to the kids. In this case "you're who you choose to be". Also it has been over a decade since I read the book, but wasn't there some black spot on the sun/bigger bad in the book that Iron Giant fought and not a nuke? (Which would be my only pedantic complaint with the film since nukes don't explode on impact).

So they're making a Civilization come Alpha Centuari sequel. Woot. Not much news at tje moment beyond a French site but I imagine we'll have more soon. http://m.neogaf.com/showthread.php?t=800661

I can understand the Muppets thing from a kind of "freaked out by the muppets" sort of angle.

New GoG teaser. Not a huge amount more than the original trailer though(apart from showing he still has that mask). I imagine we'll see more and more coming up.

I should probably give my boss some extra credit then for enquiring with me if Cap 2 would be alright for his two 9 year old daughters. My main thing was that it's a bit espionagey that would likely go over their heads. Suggested Muppets/Rio instead (turns out he dislikes Muppets, but quite enjoyed first Rio)

I'm gonna assume Pistorious? (image isn't loading) I don't much care one way or the other. His main claim to fame being a paralympian gold medallist not long before the murder, otherwise I imagine the case wouldn't be a blip on the media's radar. Though maybe the coverage is only pretty heavy here in UK?