It’s Fantasy Friday, that means another installment of Blog For A Beer! Every week we offer up a bloggy prompt and invite you to discuss and debate the topic. The comments will close at 11:59PM Pacific time Saturday and, if we have at least 10 participants, we’ll award $10 in beer (or sundae, if you’re a minor) money to the most interesting or entertaining contributor after that. Close out the weekend in style!
You may have noticed that this week we posted a game review. We’re going to have more gaming content from now on because games are awesome and we love them. So for this week’s BfaB we’d like to know what your favorite games are and why? Are you a hardcore D&D player? An occassional White Wolf LARPer? Stuck to your Wii? Addicted tot hat first person shooter? Don’t just stick to current games. there have to be some people out there still chasing greatness in Pong or living high off of their amazing Pac-Man high score from 1986.
Civilization: Revolutions was just released on July 8th for next gen consoles. I have been exerting an incredible show of willpower in not buying it. Why? Because I tried the demo, and was up until 4am on a work night — and only stopped because the demo cut me off! Evil, evil game.
Yeah, games are like vampires. Not Nosferatu vampires – the ones that dress nice and sing in rock bands and whatnot. Anne Rice vampires. I’ve lost a lot of lide force to Diablo (all versions), all kinds of console games, RPGs, Scrabble, hide and seek, red rover – the list is long and sad. Remember that TNG episode where the whole Enterprise got caught up playing that computer game? That was my life, like, 13 through 30. Except without Data. Whatever happened to Brent Spiner, anyway? I bet he’s somewhere playing Grand Theft Auto.
ZOMBIES!!!!!!!
The Monopoly of the apocalypse. You can learn a lot about yourself and your friends by playing this game. You get to see who the backstabber is, who will help you find medical attention, and who will sadly and tragically be left behind as a decoy for the brain-munching masses.
It is really cut-throat and follows all zombie-cinema logic. The graphics look like they came from EC comics.
I’ve always been partial to the Myst/Riven series of computer games and I’m a big fan of White Wolf’s various RPGs.
Of course, I cheated my way through Riven, and have never actually played any World of Darkness games.
Strange? I guess, but what I tend to like about these games is the world-building – actually playing them seems irrelevant to that endeavor. (Also having no patience for puzzles and no friends geeky enough to role play with.)
Nothing quite rivals an RPG rule book for making sure supernatural beings are operating according to their own rules. How much can a werewolf bench-press? Let’s check the chart! How easy is it for a vampire to mesmerize someone? Let’s roll the dice and add it up!
“Nothing quite rivals an RPG rule book for making sure supernatural beings are operating according to their own rules”
No doubt. I thought by the end of Buffy, Spike would be walking around on cloudy days.
And What about Video Game Movies?
We all know that video games based on movies completely suck 99 out of 99.2 times. But what about movies and television shows based on video games?
Uwe Boll is, of course, the king of ruining a perfectly good game by making a lame ass movie about it (Blood Rayne, House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark). I mean, Blood Rayne – you have a half-vampire mega-babe in tight leather battling vampires and proto-nazis – how can you mess that up? It’s movie gold on a silver platter. And yet, he suckified it. Oh, how he suckified it. In fact, I think he exudes some kind of suckifying field around himself that affects all those near him as well. How else could you get such an abysmal performance from Sir Ben Kingsley?
And while I fondly remember the D&D cartoon series from the ’80s, don’t even get me started on the two Dungeons & Dragons live action movies. What lost opportunities those were, both to produce a series of richly detailed and epic movies with developing character arcs, and to generate new interest in the product line. Seriously, WoTC, if you are thinking of making another movie, give me a call. I guarantee you I could write a better script than whatever you have, even with one hand tied behind my back and a monkey beating me on the head with one of those annoying singing fish novelty gifts – or your money back.
And let’s not forget television shows.
“Rubik, the Amazing Cube” anyone? Seriously, they made a cartoon with Rubik’s Cube as the main character. Putting aside the obvious plot and characterization problems with basing a show around an inanimate square puzzle toy, I’m surprised they even had time to animate a single episode before the fad passed them by.
Sure, there have been a few decent movies, I suppose. The Tomb Raider flicks didn’t completely suck. The first Mortal Kombat was entertaining and honest about what it was – a special-effects-laden rip-off of Enter the Dragon. And I have high hopes for the Halo movie since Peter Jackson is involved.
But there have been so many more bad ones than good.
What do ya’ll think? Favorite video game movies? Most despised video game movies? Video game movies that are so awful they are entertaining?
Any movies you hope (or dread) they will make into a movie? Or want to take a stab at guessing how Uwe Boll might destroy your favorite video game with bad casting, cliché dialogue, and horrible storylines?
For example:
Halo: the Movie (if produced and directed by Uwe Boll)
Master Chief’s escape pod has a hyperdrive accident that sends him back into Earth’s distant past. Completely stripped of his armor, and any of the distinctive weapons or vehicles from the game, Master Chief (Dolph Lundgren) must help save a small eastern-European village from “The Brute” — a half-pig, half-man dictator — and his cadre of vaguely orcish “Elites.” And to make matters worse, “the Flood” – a secret caste of ninja monk lepers – has kidnapped the village’s beautiful healer Cortana (played by Asian soft-porn star … well, her name’s not really important).
I get nostalgic over the Commodore 64 days. Ah, Bard’s Tale. Once every other year or so I’ll play with c64 emulators on my PC. But I think that if I had an actual old C64 and disk drive, it would get old pretty quick. I get impatient when my computer takes a full minute to boot up. But back in the day?
(I command character to enter room)
Prompt: Please Insert Disk 2.
(I insert disk 2).
Reading:
ENZZZKKKRRRRZZZZZZSSS
Bp Bp
ENXXZZZKRRRSSSAAAZZZ
Bp zzz Bp
Ennzzzaaakkkkrrbbpppsss
kRAAA kRAAA kn kn bp
ENZZKrr …
(I run across street to get another big gulp. Come home, fix quick bowl of Peanut Butter Captain Crunch. Maybe change the “funny” message on my mini-cassette answering machine. Come back to computer).
…ZZZKRRRMMP
Bp Bp Ehhhhhhhk.
(Character enters room. I step on trap and die. Crap! Did I back that character up on my “character save” floppy disk?).
Halo needs no movie. Halo has Red vs. Blue, one of the funniest webshows I have ever seen.
OK, one of the only webshows I have ever seen. (So psyched for Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along blog, though. Whedon and NPH! W00t!)
Commodore 64–yes! Grade school was all about Lemonade Stand. If you did well at the end of the summer, your reward was “The Rockefellers of the world salute you.” And a friend of mine had a computer that ran on cassettes (already ancient by that time). We loved cruising around the universe, fighting Klingons in a game called “Star Track.” Somehow that simple spelling change let them still use “Klingon” and the “Enterprise” without any copyright infringement…or at least so the designers must have believed.
And in an abrupt shift from nostalgia to the present, Settlers of Catan is tops in my book–I’ve enjoyed RPGs and computer games and all kinds of other things game-related, but a good board game interests me most. And Settlers is the best that I’ve found. All the expansions like Searfarers and such are good and fine, but really it’s the basic game that does it for me. The others just add complexity where it isn’t needed. Settlers has a great balance of uncertainty and strategy and bargaining.
Despite the advancement of computer games, RPG’s, and all the rest, I have probably spent more of my life playing Zork than nearly any other game or world. I used to go to a friend’s house in high school and the two of us would stare into his amber colored Apple II monitor for hours, searching the white house, flood control dam #3, the Great Underground Empire, and Beyond. I’m talking days of this at a time.
The best part was we never really figured out much on the games. Kill troll. Take all. Kill wizard. Get coconut. I used to have some of the best imaginings of this weird world full of obscure references (Hello, Sailor) and the possibility of getting eaten by a grue whenever the old rusty lantern ran out of batteries.
What the game lacked in graphics, it made up for in spades with sensawunda. Faster processors and an inclusion of graphics killed the games for us. When the game turned into a clone of Myst, the old text game was sorely missed. But probably the worst part was because the new computers didn’t run 5.25″ disks anymore. We never figured out how to beat the games.
A couple of years ago, I found all three original games online. It was like looking at old photographs. All I needed was the voice-over and I could have been reliving the Wonder Years like Fred Savage. A couple of geeks playing Zork, talking about girls we would never get the nerve to ask out, cool TV shows, fantasy novels, dreading the beginning of the school year, and thinking about how getting our driver’s licenses were going to change everything. It was a flashback for nerds, a veritable geek-back.
But those were good times, and good games. Too bad you had to actually know the guys from MIT who invented the damned things just to beat them. At that point, it wasn’t were you took the game, but where the game took you.
Ten comments — and no one, utterly no one, has mentioned board games? Not a single mention of the brilliant, endlessly varied Settlers of Catan (not to mention its myriad opportunities to speculate about the relationships your fellow players have with sheep); Carcassonne, with its pig fascination; Medici; Ra (where you can yell RA! at inappropriate intervals, scaring a cat); Order of the Stick….
…and this is without even mentioning the classic standbys: Risk, Parcheesi and so on.
This reminder brought to you from the person who went to Gen-Con and was permanently lost in the board game section, never actually managing to see the rest of the con (I have heard rumours that Gen-Con does have other offerings besides board games, but you can’t prove this by me). The same person, incidentally, who will be heading out to a D&D game this evening.
And Clint — I too, have fond memories of Zork. Not that I ever managed to solve it….
Yea! New look! Go Fantasy Magazine!
Mari – actually, to be fair, Daniel did already praise board games, and Catan in particular.
And yeah, to paraphrase the Dead Milkmen, if you don’t know Zork, then your store could use some fixin. Hitchhiker’s Guide text game too. Tip – don’t kick the dog. Or is it kick the dog? I can’t ever remember. And if you do the wrong one, after hours of playing you reach the end and find you’ve screwed the pooch. Figuratively, of course. It wasn’t Farmer’s Daughter after all.
A big Boo-Yah for Risk and Axis & Allies. But man do those games suck up your time. Which is probably why I haven’t played in years. Except on the computer.
And it really bites if you make a few bad rolls up front, and are in a pretty clear “no-win” scenario from the start — you end up sitting there for a few hours being a good sport and putting on a good show of trying to conquer the world by effectively curling up into a defensive ball, all the while hoping the gang will be willing to play a second game when this one’s done so you might have a real chance to win.
Not that that has ever happened to me, of course. I always crush all who oppose me. I’m just sayin’, I can imagine how that might happen, you know, to someone else.
And now if you’ll excuse me, I must get back to destabilizing the oil market as step one of my diabolical plan to conquer the world (and check to make sure my robot army is coming along nicely for step 19-and-a-half). And the best part? Nobody will suspect I am behind it all until it is too late. Bwa-ha-ha. BWAH-HA-HA-HA-HAAAAA!
…
Wait. Did I write that, or think that?
Ah crap.
I just have to say that I absolutely LOVE the artwork on this page. Keep ‘em coming!
Text-based games rule! Anybody else play “Planetfall”? I think it might have been a prelude to the Roger Wilco games.
I liked Risk, Stratego, and best of all Crossbows and Catapults. The bummer with Risk and Stratego was having to set the stupid game up for half an hour. By then it was always time for at least one player to have to go home.
For card games, anyone else ever play Egyptian Rat F*ck? Or how bout “Bullshit?” Mau was a good one, but I always forgot to name my Beatle.
Lots of choices since I have been a gamer of one sort or another for as long as I can remember…
Though I have played many of game (RPG, strategy, board, Video and txt – and spent loads on them)if you mentioned a name I probably have had it or looked at it at least. I have longest been a role-player and the game that I think really defined my life as a gamer is Call of Cthulhu….I might add Stormbringer to that but I always come back to Call of Cthulhu.
When I mention the game to people familiar with it either they love it or hate it; that feeling pretty much stems from the fatal nature of the setting….your pretty much doomed – like the characters in Lovecrafts stories. You either eventually go mad or the horrors get you.
I hardly ever really got chances to play but its the game that comes to mind first….