ChrisTalbot.com

Maybe Palladium is getting over its PDF phobia. The company has put the original Recon up on its site for free download.

Here's an interesting column about how RPG publishers should start taking on the book publishing business model. I think they're better off going the route that many war game publishers have gone, though. Ever since I learned about GMT's P500 model, I've been convinced that it would work for the RPG industry.

I just checked out the new Ghost Rider trailer. I'm not really a big Nicolas Cage fan, but I think this is going to kick some serious ass.

As I'm getting near the end of completing my Preacher TPB collection and I'm just about caught up on The Walking Dead TBPs, I'm starting to think ahead about what trades to start picking up. I'm really leaning towards maybe buying the first trade of The Ultimates. Even though I was never a fan of The Avengers, it sounds like it might be mature enough to be of interest to me.

Another one that's tempting is Ultimate Spider-Man. Marvel ruined Spider-Man for me in the mid-1990s with some of the stupidest comic book stories ever written, and I really don't want to go back to the original continuity. Still, it would be fun to read the rebooted version of Spidey. I've been enjoying the digest versions of Spider-Girl (I should probably be ashamed of this), and it would be nice to get back to Spider-Man himself.

Of course, I'm also thinking I should probably collect the Hellblazer or Sandman trades. I don't really want to collect more than two or three trades at a time, though. :-/

X-Men: The Last Stand was a disappointment. A bunch of us took in a matinee showing of it on Saturday, and while it was better than several Marvel movies (not difficult to do, of course), I think the producers really should've waited for Bryan Singer to finish his work on Superman Returns so he could finish off the X-Men series (or maybe it's not finished; more sequels could be made). Brett Ratner really wasn't up to the job of continuing the series.

A few random comments...

The movie felt rushed. Here and there, the pacing slowed down a bit to deal with a key scene, but so many scenes were rushed that they ended up feeling incomplete. It seemed Ratner just wanted to hurry through the story just to get to the big brawl at the end. Well, what could we really expect from the guy who brought us the Rush Hour movies?

Some of the new "major" characters, like Multiple Man, Kitty Pryde and Callisto (amongst others), really only seemed to be included for a display of cool powers rather than any reason related to the story. For instance, Multiple Man was just there for one scene that really could've been left on the cutting room floor. Kitty Pryde's entire existence in the movie didn't seem to work. Why was she suddenly an important young member of the X-Men? Character development for most of the new characters was shoddy, at best. There wasn't any.

While it's a rather poor way of bringing the franchise to a close, at least the producers managed to see things through. They made some really poor choices, though. I think X-Men 3 could've actually been on par with the first two if they had put better talent behind the movie.

The Muppets do Star Wars.

There's just a little over a month until Origins. Over the next month, I'll have to make plans and finalize my budget. Thankfully, hotel and travel plans are already taken care of.

This will be my first trip to a major game convention. For years, I've wanted to attend something like GenCon, but I've always put it off in the hopes of finding people to travel with. Thankfully, there are several people from TABS who go to Origins every year. Last year, Jacquie and I spent our vacation in Connecticut with her brother. This year, I wanted to do something related to my hobby. It probably means next year will be spent in Nova Scotia or something, though.

Anyway, I think it will be kind of neat to get a chance to see brand new games, meet some of the designers, play games with gamers from all over and try out games I haven't played before. Oh yeah, and add games to my collection, of course. ;)

I've been looking for a link to this classic anti-d20 RPGnet rant for some time. Someone finally posted a link to it in a thread I was reading. I thought I'd share.

It looks like V For Vendetta will be hitting DVD on August 1st. It never takes long for movies to get DVD releases any more, does it?

Here's a good article on when TV shows lose their focus. I suppose this is why shows should be designed to be short-lived rather than ongoing. Look how well everything was tied together in Babylon 5 -- well, with the exception of most the fifth season, anyway.

On a whim, I picked up the first season of Dark Angel. Simply because of the dark future sci-fi setting, I had kind of wanted to see it, but I wasn't about to buy the first season for $50. Well, Wal-Mart helped convince me to pick it up by dropping the price to $17.50. For $20, even if I just watch it once, it's more than worth it.

And that's what I did. I just finished watching the last episode of the season a little while ago. For the most part, I enjoyed it. The music used throughout the show wasn't to my taste, nor were some of the characters (Original Cindy, for instance -- people that speak about themselves in the first person just bug the shit out of me).

Some episodes dropped down to the level of being lame, but I quite enjoyed the last couple of episodes in the season. I'm almost tempted to pick up the second season, but I have this nagging feeling that I'm going to be very disappointed in it. Still, if I find it for a good price, I'll probably pick it up.

Now to really prove I'm a geek... From about halfway through the season, I started thinking about how the premise would work as an RPG. I think with some modifications to the back-story and some of the circumstances (it would have to work as a group story throughout, with everybody playing an X5, for instance), it could be spun into a short campaign.

The perfect tenant? I have to admit I'm skeptical about whether this is real or just an Internet hoax.

My interest in minis games goes up and down, but no matter what, I luvs me some zombie minis. I just love the hippy zombie. "Peace out, brother. Brraaaiiinnnsss."

I share Doug Brunell's loathing for dance films. Maybe they were cute and cuddly when I was a kid, but now that I'm an adult (stop laughing, Jacquie) ... well, I'll go along with Doug's replacement idea. :)

Broadcast journalism at its finest. And the video clip of the screw-up.

EDIT: And this might explain how it all happened.

A friend recently pointed out Engrish.com. I'd never been to this site before. Now I don't know how I managed to miss it for all these years.

Rawl and I went out for coffee/tea last night. It was the first time in I-don't-know-how-long that I actually set foot in a Starbucks. The coffee wasn't nearly as bad as I remember it being, but still, there were bloody grinds in the bottom of my cup. Bah!

We chatted a bit about gaming, books, dragon boating and some other things. We had to cut it off at about 10:00, though. The Starbucks was getting ready to close.

Man, we really need a proper café in Pickering/Ajax.

Why is it that hobbies can oftentimes be more stressful than work? They're supposed to be fun.

I have to admit I'm seriously considering giving up RPGs again. Over the last couple of months, I've been trying to get an RPG group off the ground again. I pretty much took what was left of my D&D group and added in two others I met through TABS (well, one's a member of TABS; the other is a friend of the member). Ever since we started gaming together, the entire hobby has felt increasingly like a chore, not something I do for fun.

A good portion of this feeling comes specifically with dealing with one of the new members. When it comes to RPGs, we don't seem to share any similar tastes. He wants long-term campaigns. I want one-shots and shorter storylines. He wants to be an action hero. I enjoy the grittiness of games like AFMBE and Call of Cthulhu. He seems only to enjoy pulp and fantasy games. I'm not exactly big on either. I much prefer horror and sci-fi.

I'm not sure whether the frustration I'm feeling is because of this one person or something simpler -- like maybe I just don't enjoy RPGs anymore. Either way, I think I'm going to be a little more hands-off and see what happens with the group. It may very well just stop.

I just realized that it would've been about this time last year that I ran my last session of my D&D campaign.

Considering how frustrated I feel about my current roleplaying efforts, I'm slowly becoming convinced that I haven't given myself enough of a break from tabletop roleplaying. :(

EDIT: I'm wrong. The last D&D session was the end of last June.

Survivor season is over. It's no longer a given that Jacquie will be home early on Thursday nights. So much for my easy gaming night. ;)

I really should get back to updating this blog on a more regular basis. I'm sure I can come up with something inane to say each and every day ... and probably even more often.

On Friday night, I kicked some serious ass at Tikal. Rich, Christine and Lita all came over to our place for some dinner (we ordered 'za) and games. Lita and Loki kept each busy for most of the evening, and then both the kid and the dog passed out shortly after we started playing Tikal.

Now I'm not the competitive type, but when a board game goes your way and you know you're going to come out on top, it feels damn good. At least with Tikal, if you're doing well, you can easily see it. I've had the "I'm gonna win" feeling with Puerto Rico several times, and not once have I one that damn game. Stupid, frickin' hidden victory points. *grumble, grumble*

Saturday was mostly spent getting ready for a Mother's Day dinner that evening. My parents and Jacquie's parents were coming over for a BBQ. I really hate prepping for those types of things. Jacquie and I tend to get on each other's nerves fairly quickly. I think we both came close to murdering the other on Saturday afternoon.

Sunday was a quiet day. I hit up Comic Book Addiction in Whitby, chatted with the owner (Steve) and ended up buying a few trades. CBA just started a new thing where if you buy nine trades, you'll get a tenth one free. Not at the same time, of course. Y'know, it's a stamped card kind of thing. :P

What's with all the RPG publishers suddenly jumping on the For Dummies bandwagon? Now White Wolf is getting into the insanity with Vampire : The Requiem For Dummies.

Screw Nintendo! After all these years, they're going to make a new Duck Hunt. I don't wanna buy a Wii. :(

Sweeeeet. Dinosaurs on DVD. Oh, that is so on my wish list!

I wanted to make a few more comments about the All Flesh Must Be Eaten adventure I ran for my Sunday night gaming group. Coffee Break of the Living Dead is essentially a Night of the Living Dead scenario in which the PCs are stuck in an office building infested with zombies. It's during the big outbreak, and the PCs seem to be the only ones left alive in the building. Get out or die trying -- that's the goal.

I'll try not to put any spoilers. I'll just comment on the game, what happened, how things went, etc.

First off, Unisystem is not a bad game system. It's fairly simple and straightforward, and because players always know what they need on a die roll to succeed, a lot of time is saved. They know instantly when they've succeeded. They don't need to ask the GM if they made their rolls or not. Very nice.

The Rule of 10 and the Rule of 1, however, don't work so well and are anything but intuitive. In fact, they're difficult to explain; and they really don't have much effect on rolls. Really, the critical success/miss thing can go too far; and when it's present, it should be stupidly simple. This is not. Very unfortunate.

Damage and life points tend to be pretty high. A reduction in both could make it a simpler game from a combat damage standpoint.

Perhaps I'm being nitpicky about those things, but really, I think the game system is pretty good despite some annoyances.

Endurance points are a bit of a pain. It makes sense that characters become fatigued, but it's difficult to tell exactly when you should assign endurance "damage." Logan seemed to think it was a bit silly to get fatigued fighing zombies with a firearm. Maybe he's right. Maybe not. Firing a gun is definitely a physical activity. Being in great personal danger at the same time and being tense would likely be fairly physically (and mentally) stressful. Still, I don't know if I was really using those rules correctly.

Survival horror is not for everybody. In fact, horror is not for everybody. Xavier expressed an intense dislike for the game in an email this morning. He also had a similar dislike for Paranoia. That's kind of too bad, as horror is one of my favourite gaming genres. AFMBE was fun for me. I'd like to run Call of Cthulhu, but it seems that would be a bad idea (Logan isn't the biggest CoC fan, either). A good portion of my gaming collection is horror, actually, and now I can't really run much of it with the Sunday night group. :(

I'm going to give Coffee Break of the Living Dead another try. The Law is very interested in playing it, so we'll drag in a handful of people at some point in the next few months (hopefully) to play the adventure. When I do run it for The Law, hopefully the decisions made will be completely different from the ones made by the group last night so I'll have a different experience with the adventure.

It would also be fun to run CBotLD as a PBeM/PbP game. :-/

I finally got a chance to run All Flesh Must Be Eaten last night. For a first time running a system, I think it went fairly well. I've asked for feedback from people, but the only person to respond so far told me he didn't enjoy it. That's unfortunate, but it happens (and this person in particular doesn't care much for horror/survival games). I have a feeling there are others who weren't overly thrilled with it, considering I caught a few sour faces throughout the evening.

George Lucas can lick my sweaty sack. Fucker.

Greetings, citzen. Do you accept your mission?

Last week, I picked up the first trade paperback of the comic The Walking Dead. I had heard of this title before, and I'd been thinking about starting to buy it for awhile. I finally caved. My love of all things undead won out.

Then I read it and wish I hadn't waited so long. The story is about a police officer who gets shot in the line of duty, goes into a coma and wakes up to find the dead have risen and the world he knew is long gone ... and so is his wife and kid. The idea is to follow the story of someone who survives the rise of the zombies and how that person manages to survive in an ongoing series. It's a very cool idea, and the first trade showed that the writer really knows what he's doing. I'm thinking about picking up the second (and maybe even the third) volume this weekend.

I've been trying to learn Go lately (specifically 9x9). I've played a couple of games on BSW. I'm in one game on Little Golem. I've even played it a couple of times with an application I downloaded that has an AI to play against.

Now, I know I'm not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but I like to think I'm at least somewhat intelligent. This game makes me feel like a retarded monkey who hasn't had his morning coffee, though. I just don't get it.

And I thought chess could be a mindfuck.

When Care Bears go bad.

On Saturday, Logan and I took a trip with Chris K. and Pete from TABS to the Great Canadian BayCon in Hamilton. I was supposed to run Shadows Over Camelot, but thankfully there weren't enough people to play the game. Why thankfully? Because it gave us the chance to go hang out in the Looney Labs booth and play demo games with Andy Looney for two hours straight.

Andy was definitely the coolest person I met at BayCon. He was just a funny, interesting, laid-back guy who designed some freakin' awesome games (all of which I want in my collection).