erion

The Gamer's Year in Review

Posted elsewhere on 12/3108, but needed here to spur some discussion.
So, in line with all the other best/worst/top 10 lists for 2008, here's the best and worst of Nerdery (IMnsHO) for 2008

The Best

Historicon. Going to Historicon with Bampf and Forcecommander easily tops my favorite things done this year. In addition to unloading extremely large piles of Nerd stuff in exchange for real money, I thoroughly enjoyed Jamie's outrage at badly painted models being bought for exorbitant prices, and the grumpy nerds across the aisle from us in the flea market who didn't sell a single thing while we left with probably 90% less than we brought.

D&D 4. The best D&D yet, Hands down. Even despite WotC's criminally botched launch of their online suite of tools. It's easy to pick up, fun to play, and even the expansion stuff we've seen so far hasn't suffered the splatbook suckery of the last edition. Martial Power probably wins for best supplement ever, though the Adventurer's Vault is a close second

Assault on Black Reach. Games Workshop scored a huge win by replacing the large terrain pieces from the 4th edition starter box with larger and more varied models for both included armies. Rules, Templates, dice, and two armies that come in at almost 500 points each for a measley $60. The kit is a great value even when buying just for either army's models, let alone the fact you can easily trade what you don't want for what somebody else doesn't want. The fact that the models look great as well is just a bonus. 5th edition 40k isn't too shabby on it's own merits, but the starter box has a lot of people coming back into the game.

Iron Man. The best initial entry in a super hero franchise since Burton's Batman in 1988. Robert Downey Jr. was so amazing as Tony Stark I was actually glad when the action sequences (which were still great) were over and we got to see more of him out of the armor. Here's hoping Marvel Studios keeps up the good work and is able to complete their plan to bring us an Avengers movie inside of five years.

Monsterpocalypse. Giant Monsters smashing each other and pretty much everything else in sight, but in a tabletop game instead of Saturday afternoons on WPIX channel 11 out of NYC. The only CMG in years to keep me interested beyond the initial release. Great Sculpts, engaging gameplay, and not too much fluff to get in the way. Privateer Press Wins in a big way with this. Even their Accessory Expansions have all been worth buying, and the fact that New York Landmarks are in the next expansion have me chomping at the bit (no pun intended, but it works).

The Demise of Wizkids. It's really sad when I can put the death of any company under the "Best" list, but WK had produced such a string of Stinkers (Creepyfreaks, Rocket Ranger, Mage Knight 2.0, Star Wars Pocketmodels, HaloClix, Shadowrun Action Clix, HorrorClix ) while beating their once-successful lines (Mechwarrior, Heroclix, Pirates of the Spanish Main, Crimson Skies) into oblivion that they deserved to die. With any luck Topps will be able to redistribute the licenses to worthy owners and keep what was good alive.

Currency Exchange Rates. I can't say enough about how great it is that $1.45 buys a british pound right now. So much Forge World to buy.

The Worst
GF9 losing the Warmachine License. They still make a lot of spiffy gaming tokens, but the Warmchine license was money in the bank for GF9. I don't know how much longer they'll manage to survive. They've got other licenses, but none was as huge or profitable. The death of wizkids hits them pretty hard, too, as they made stuff for Heroclix, Mechwarrior, and Pirates. At least you can still get some of the cool terrain they made.

Mongoose Publishing. Leaving at least five game lines in the Lurch, Mongoose decided at the beginning of 2008 to simply stop producing miniatures all together. They also decided to not license themselves to make 3rd party product for D&D 4. How's that working for ya?

Reaper's Legendary Encounters. The best fantasy miniatures company in the business managed to totally screw themselves when launching a non-random Prepainted Plastics line (the first batch of which is entirely sold out) by utterly failing to release the 2nd batch on time, and the 3rd batch hasn't yet seen the light of day more than five months after it's announced date. They haven't even managed to reprint the first batch yet. Meanwhile, Wizards of the Coast has taken a cue from the first wave's huge success and will be releasing non-random hero packs and fixed encounter packs of monsters from it's D&D Miniatures brand in 2009. I can't say I'm surprised by reaper's failure to capitalize on this (see below), but I am hugely disappointed.

Reaper's CAV. A continuing clusterfuck of the highest order. As of midnight tonight, their "Rage Chronicles 2008" release of updates for the game will need to be renamed before it is released. A great game left bleeding from the rectum by horrifying mismanagment of the line.

So, what are your winners and losers for 2008?

So Privateer Press' collectible miniature Monster Mash-up game released on Friday.  Word on the intarweb is that Privateer is actually out of starter sets at their end. I'd call that a successful release. 

As many of you know, we actually had some preview stuff scored for us at Gen Con (Thanks bampf!) and have been playing the equivalent of booster draft games since then.  We liked what we saw, but were prevented from getting to the meat of the game because our ability to have synergy between units on the board was very limited.  When the game went into general release on Friday, that all changed.

Our first game with armies mostly from our chosen factions happened on Saturday afternoon, and it was a very different ball game.  Suddenly units close together added extra dice when they attacked.  Monsters granted special abilities to every one of their faction-specific allies on the board, boosting defense and making more dice available for use by recycling misses.  Units were cheaper to deploy, so more of them hit the board more quickly and more often (since they're never actually removed from the game, just recycled).  

We also had more buildings to smash, so power dice were more readily available earlier in the game.  That meant more Power Attacks, and more powerful ones at that. I can see a time coming when I will be destroying buildings just to clear lines of movement and lines of sight for my units and monsters.  The power dice will just be a boon. 

In effect, I saw the game change from the fun but slow-paced entity we'd been playing into something that really captured the essence of Giant Monsters (or robots or alien invaders) mixing it up downtown.  Endless Hordes of disposable units do their best to inhibit the progress of the enemy and support their own monster, while being grossly ineffective (unless many, many dice are combined into a single attack) against their Titanic foe.  Meanwhile, two juggernauts move irresistibly toward one another and the consequences to the surrounding environment be damned.

Suffice it to say I can't wait to play more.

So, I have been a cooking fool this weekend.

Saturday I followed AB's recipe for Gyros (pronounced Gyros) for the 2nd time.  The first time out things tasted fine, but preparations were thwarted by a busted food processor and we ended up with something more akin to Greek meatloaf than nice thinly slice-able Gyro Meat.  So  I scored a nice Black and Decker (yes, the guys who make drills.  I've had their food vacuum sealer for nigh on three years without a hiccup) 8 cup model for a pretty good price last week and went to town.

But before we get into that, I want to ask about how people ever prepared food before the Advent of the Kitchen-aid Stand Mixer?.  For my Gyros, I used about 3/4 of a pound of Ground lamb (which ended up making enough for five pretty hefty sandwiches)?  Even the fine folks at Karns, who otherwise have the best meat counter around, balk when you ask them to grind lamb for you.  Enter kitchen aid.  I spent about five minutes seperating bone from meat and cutting it into grindable chunk, but in less than 45 seconds all that lamb was finely ground and reading for the food procesor.  We've also used attachments to turn a block of cheese into shredded deliciousness, and also to make pasta.  We've had it for more than five years, and akin to computers and cell phones I can't remember how life was before it.

Anyway, once the meat was ground, all it took was some spices (rosemary majoram, salt, pepper, onion and garlic, as I recall) and it all went into the food processor to be turned from a mixture of ingredients to a fine paste.  Load it into a loaf pan and let it set up in the fridge for a couple of hours.

45 minutes in the oven and I was slicing 1/8" thick wafers of deliciousness.  Add Feta, tzatziki sauce , lettuce and tomato on a pita and you've got Greek Heaven.  Our Tzatziki had a bit too much bite (I think mostly from too much Garlic and red wine winegar, so we're going to fiddle with that a bit.  But the main ingredient is a success and I think we've got our main course for the next Nerdstravaganza.

Today was a bit lower key.  Stuffed shells are currently in the oven.  They're pretty basic, but because of the successful transformation of lamb into paste I used the food processer to get my meat filling nice and smooth, and then blended it directly with the Ricotta/ Mozzerella cheese mixture before filling the shells with a Super Shooter (which for the uninitiated is sort of an electric piping bag.  The final filling mixture was delicious even before being coated with my in-famous homemade generic Italian tomato sauce and back under a generous heaping quantity of shredded mozzerella.  I can't imagine they'll be less than delicious.

Also:  Jamie is a dirty cheater.  That Rhino was immobilized!  That'll teach us not to use the tokens, huh?

That is all.

Sometime around 730 GMT today, the worlds largest supercollider was successfully tested on the Franco-swiss border.  Much to the Chagrin of many doomsayers, there was no planet-shattering black hole created by the test.

I'm always amused by people who protest things about which they have no understanding whatsoever.  Would they have felt vindicated if the world had been destroyed?  Would they even have known?

Of ourse, today's test actually involved no collisions, and the worlds leading minds, including Stephen Hawking have all agreed there is no danger whatsoever of the Earth being sucked into a black hole created when they actually do start slamming beams of protons into one another at very high fractions of the speed of light (which is cool no matter how you slice it). 

So yep, we're still here.

In any event, I couldn't help but think of the Immortal words of one Dr. Peter Venkman, who said "Why worry?  Each of us is wearing an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on our back."

Man, fuck that.

The last time I posted here we were talking about the impending doom of Warhammer 40k 5th Edition.  It's been out for like a month now, and all is well.  I've played more 40k since it came out than I did in the 12 months before it was released, and everything is good.  Thus far I don't actively dislike any of the changes.  And the new Boxed game for this edition is chock full of goodness.  A pair of armies you can easily take to 500 points or so, and decent figures to boot.  Orkses for Donovan and a Blood Ravens upgrade for me(especially with the new Space Marine Codex Barely a month away).  Still working on Eldar, but now I'm doing that in more manageable chunks than a bulk investment.  Tau have fallen by the wayside for a bit, but I may get back to them before too long.  Burn out, man.

Played a bit of Privateer Press' foray into CCG's, called Monsterpocalypse.  Giant Monsters and Robots smash one another, smaller creatures and vehicles, and buildings into bits.  It's good fun, and once we stop screwing up the rules and get some more models (the ones we have are all pre-release samples courtesy of Bampf's impromptu trip to Gen Con.   We're not playing much of Privateer's more traditional games right now, and that's a shame, because they used to be so much fun.

D&D 4th edition premiered to much fanfare and much gnashing of teeth that (unsurprisingly, at least for me) the electronic online components were far from ready.  No matter, as we've banned all players but the DM from having a laptop at the table anyway.  It's the best D&D yet, and I've played every incarnation.  Bampf is basically addicted to it.  He doesn't play much else anymore, not even Blood Bowl, as far as I can tell.

Bampf, Jamie and I sold off a bunch of dust-collecting Nerd stuff at Historicon.  Aside from the swarm of locust-nerds that stripped us of nearly all our unwanted crap in exchange for cold hard cash, the highlights were some really nice Flames of War Tables, a trip to the Shady Maple smorgasbord, two very grumpy nerds across the aisle from us who didn't sell a single one of their overpriced, under-painted models, and Jamie's unbridled, Bruce Banner-esque rage at the price some jerk in the dealer's room was getting for badly painted noise marines.

Miko gave me some tips for taking better pictures of my models in exchange for database assistance, so when I get a couple of free hours some weekend (ha!) I'll try to get the galleries updated. 

It's taken me a couple of days to come to grips with the death of Gary Gygax.  When I first heard, it wasn't even through the bursts of wandering of the intarweb that punctuates my workdays.  A co-worker, knowing the depths of my nerditry, came to my cubicle and offered his condolences. 

My jaw honest-to-god dropped open.  I instantly fled to CNN.com to verify such a thing could possibly be true.  For the first hour, I felt hollow.

I never even met him.  But one summer when I was a teenager his hand changed the course of my life in a manner in which only a true mentor is capable.  It is because of him that I grew to love literature.  It is because of him that I cajoled my parents into buying my first computer (The Bard's Tale, anyone?).  It is because of this man that I have the true friendships I have today, some of which are approaching 20 years in duration.  It is because of him that I wear the badge of Nerd with honor.

His is one of the legacies that has shaped not only my life and the lives of countless others, but pop culture and indeed the course of history in the last thirty-odd years.  He wasn't even actively involved in Dungeons & Dragons.  Indeed, he had not been for many years.  But those who have the privilege of rolling polyhedral dice for a living, writing the paperback fantasy novels that populate innumerable bookshelves, and programming and maintaining the virtual shared fantasy worlds of modern computer gaming have that privilege because they, and so many others before them, stood on the shoulders of this fallen giant.

Rest in Peace, Gary.

There is fresh paint on my Forge World Avatar of Khaine.

Can't say I didn't see this one coming.  Mongoose is stopping production on all of it's minaiture lines.  Even the one that never went on hiatus ever will go out of production on 3/31.

With as badly as they've bungled so many things wargame-related,  I can't say I'm sad to see them go.  I'm sure bampf will be overjoyed to hear they'll be focusing on their roleplaying line, with which they feel they did a very good job. 

Shape of things to come?  People demanding quality finally driving the demons out?  One can only hope...