Myself and Bulletmagnet have talked before about our involvement in the old Triple Triad X community. The sucessor community, Triple Triad Advance is an utter cesspool of a community and I really disconnected from the whole scene a few year back.

However, acouple of days ago, a new Triple Triad site went into Beta and could really use some testers trying out the game, reporting bugs and givng general feedback. The site is slick, well-designed and it's the first time in years that I've been optimistic about the game.



For those who are interested, the game is based on the minigame from FF8 with a lot of new features such as a card shop,new rles (explaned n the forums) and various community features. You can click here to visit the site, but also please sign up to the forums so you can report back on the game. My name on the site is Vimes. Gimme a shout if you fancy a game.

I really do think that this site has a lot of potential, but only if the creator takes the time to promote the game outside of the old community. There is no benefit of asking the old guard, tired and negative as they are, to give formative feedback on the site. Useful feedback will come from those outside of the old community, able to objectively give feedback that is not tainted by nostalgia or the drama of previous sites.

Please have a look at the site, sign up, have a couple of games. They've only just opened, so there aren't many playing and you may have to arrange matches wth your friends, but make the time and give it a go.

I love the Dawn of War games. We’ve already established from previous articles that I’m a fan of Games Workshop’s tabletop games, but I’ve never been a huge fan of the sci-fi based Warhammer 40,000. It has a great universe, great models, and there are other games set in the same universe that I utterly love (Inquisitor and Necromunda) but I’ve never been as a big a fan of 40k as I am of the fantasy based Warhammer.

I do love the Dawn of War games, however. I bought all of the expansion packs to the original and I have the sequel, though I’m not very far into it yet. I am very aware that my reasons for liking the game may be a little different from most people. Oh sure, it has nice mechanics, a good pace, a decent selection of armies and units. But what I really love, above all else, is the Army Painter. For someone like me, who doesn’t have the time or patience to sit and churn out army after army on the tabletop, it’s a godsend! It lets me test out colour schemes, emulate schemes that I’ve seen and liked, and it allows me to select a characterful army for a specific match, enemy or tactic.



I’m going to focus on the Space Marines for a number of reasons. The Space Marines have, by far, the largest number of recognised colour schemes, with many named chapters varying in fame from the very prominent Ultramarines (blue, usually with white or gold trim), Dark Angels (dark green), Blood Angels (red with red or black trim)and Black Templars (Black with white trim) to the more obscure chapters such as the Imperial Harbingers (completely white armour with a yellow helmet), Celebrants (yellow, orange and red armour) and the Brazen Claws (quartered red and blue armour).



The space marines are also relatively simple models. They are a very good army to create custom colour schemes for because of their clearly segmented armour, iconic shoulder pads and large, flat surfaces. Plus, and this point is of utmost importance, they look cool! A little generic? Yes, but cool nonetheless. They are the army which most represent the battlefields of the 41st millennium, the army which has seen the least fundamental visual change since their inception, and the staring point for the collections of many players.



Although they are often considered generic, each Space Marine chapter (well, most) have their own distinct personality, and this is something I like to play to in the Dawn of War series. If I know I’m going to taking on the Tyranids, then I’ll usually go Ultramarines, many of whom were wiped out by a massive Tyranid attack. The Ultramarines are a chapter that adheres strictly to the Index Astartes, essentially a playbook for Space Marines, which advocates a balanced approach to war and a rigid chapter structure. Well, they would, their Primarch (leader and genetic progenitor) wrote it!. They do, however, make one exceptions, by fielding specialist veteran Tyranid Hunter squads made of survivors of previous encounters with the Tyranids. It’s too characterful to pass up, especially in more squad-based Dawn of War 2.



There are other examples. Do you like to fight up close and personal? Inject a bit of character into your force by fielding the vicous Blood Angels or the feral Space Wolves. Enjoy a more vehicle-oriented approach? Field the technology loving Iron Hands.

Of course, you don’t need to limit yourself to one the existing, recognised chapters. You can have a lot of fun designing your own one and leading it into battle. Hey, if you really like it, you might even want to grab a couple of miniatures and paint them up in your colours. My chapter is called the Verdant Fists:



I’ve not really got any back story for my chapter, but it gives a nice sense of continuity to go from playing on the tabletop to playing an online RTS with the same team. Dawn of War represents to me, in much the same way as the new Blood Bowl game, a bridging point between two hobbies. Over the past few years, Games Workshop have become a lot smarter over who they give their licences to and I’m really hoping this continues and that more games are created, whether interpretations such as Dawn of War or faithful translations such as Blood Bowl, to further bring GW’s intellectual property into the digital realm and that these games are made to complement the tabletop original and, in doing so, enthuse and excite GW’s core audience in the way that this game has so clearly excited me over the past few years.

I was swithering over whether to post this one. Not strictly video game related, though it is gaming related in the wider sense, and it was inspired by a videogame. Oh well, I guess it's something a little different.

As you may have read, I’ve recently been very into the new Blood Bowl game by Cyanide Studios. Specifically, I love how faithful the game is to the original boardgame. It really has inspired me to paint up a new team as my old Orcs are looking very tired and fugly.



I said in my Blood Bowl post that I was going to paint up a team of nuns. I do have this team sitting on my desk, but I’m not going to paint them just yet, as I really only have the minimum number of them to form a team and although I’m looking forward to painting them, I’d rather paint a full team, including subs, first. As such, I’ve undercoated a more generic female team:



These are a few selected models from the team. I really like the style of this team, similar to the official human one, but slender and in more dynamic poses. I’m thinking a blue and white colour scheme and the name, ‘The Reikland Bairns’ as a tribute to my own home team, Falkirk F.C. Reikland, by the way, is a state in Empire, the main human nation in the Warhammer world.

Now, the team is looking good and the well-balanced human rules should serve me well. There was something missing though. The humans get an Ogre in their team to fill the ‘big guy’ role and he’s great at stomping on those pesky blitzers on the other team. He’d look a bit out of place, however, in my otherwise all-female team. I’d need a female Ogre.



Perfect!

The team is so far undercoated in white and I hope to start painting them over the next couple of days. I’ll update when I’ve made some progress.

Everyone has that close little group of friends who play together, or more often multiple groups which occasionally overlap. In my case, regardless of what game I’m playing, I can count on my two closest friends to jump in and help me out, or to shoot me in the face with a rifle-grenade.

It’s an awkward number, three. We can’t split ourselves in to even teams. On consoles it’s always ‘winner stays on’ and any game that pits the three of us against one-another is subject to alliances which last until one player turns his back long eough for another to stick the knife in.

Recently, our main games to play together have been World of Warcraft (though two of us have kicked the habit), Call of Duty: World at War, Sins of a Solar Empire. I’m going to talk briefly about each, and what makes them so suited to our 3-man party.



I started playing WoW about a year before the first expansion and it took me almost all this time for my first character to reach 60. I just wasn’t that into it. I had a few alts, I didn’t invest all that much time, and I was beginning to wonder why exactly I was continuing to pay a monthly fee for a game I just didn’t play all that much. I was quite close to just leaving it, until one of my friends (we’ll refer to him by his WoW name, Puncho) decided to give it a go and got very into it, levelling to 70 with me very shortly after the release of the expansion. The other (henceforth referred to as Gilius), soon followed and although he didn’t invest as much time in the game, we formed a solid team.

Three players in WoW doesn’t immediately sound like the ideal setup. Most things outside of dungeons can be done solo, and you need five for an instance run. However, we found that with our good healer, tank and DPS setup, it didn’t really matter who else we brought in. We could pull most sub-par DPS through any dungeon. As is the way with WoW, we all three became hopelessly addicted. Despairing of por leadership in the first guild we’d ever joined, we moved on to start our own one, with our three characters forming the core of our raid team.

We stayed with WoW until eventually clearing all of the Wrath launch content. We’ve tried Ulduar, but two of us had rather lost interest already. Puncho is still in the game, however, and has cleared Ulduar.



More recently, we’ve taken to playing Call of Duty: World at War. Gilius and I had been paying CoD4 on-and-off for a while, and it was the Steam weekend deal for World at War which brought Puncho into the series. We started off finding empty servers and agreeing on set 2v1 challenges or free for all bouts. It was good fun and although we often visited busier servers for bigger games, we got quite annoyed when people burst in on our smaller, ‘private’ matches.

This frustration led to us renting out our own server. This gives us the flexibility to play our private free for alls or to open the server up to more people when we want to. I’ve actually been quite surprised by how quickly the server fills up when we open it. With such a close-knit little group, it gets very competitive, with much shouting, taunting and personal vendettas! We’re even starting to see regulars show up on our server, really establishing an ‘extended family’ feeling to our games.

We all have our little trademarks too. Gilius loves controlling the tower in the Roundhouse level and hates anybody using machine or submachine guns. Puncho can’t stop himself groaning at the stupid catchphrases and taunt that Gilius come out with, and gets rather pissed off when caught by one of the Bouncing Betty mines.



In the past couple of weeks, we’ve added another game to our repertoire. Sins of a Solar Empire is a game that Gilius and I have been playing infrequently for some time. Puncho recently picked it up and we’ve taken to playing some incredibly cutthroat matches. I’m particularly notorious in our tryst for being a tad untrustworthy in strategy games, so I’m usually betrayed mercilessly as a pre-emptive maneuver.

The most recent example was the other night. Puncho and I had held a strong alliance for the whole match and we had formed a casual cease-fire with Gilius whilst we finished off some computer-controlled empires. Having done this, I agreed with Puncho to end the cease-fire and to take on Gilius’ fleet whilst he (Puncho) attacked Gilius’ planets. Needless to say, I was double crossed. I crushed Gilius’ fleet, but not before Puncho had ripped through three of my own planets. As an aside, I still won that game, which made a nice change.



I’m sure you all have such anecdotes, and that many will be more interesting than the examples I’ve given, but I do have a point. Gaming with my two closest friends is what really keeps me in the hobby. It’s what made gaming interesting in the first place, competing with them in Worms and Street Fighter 2, working with them to finish off Super Mario World and Sonic 2, and running clans and guilds with them in WoW and Gunbound. I really take objection to the outsider’s view that gaming is an antisocial pursuit as, without gaming, I would never have really gotten close to my best friends and more recently, when we all went our separate ways for University, we would most definitely not have stayed in touch to the extent that we did.

We would have phoned one another, sure. We’d have had Skype and MSN, but I don’t think that would have done it. The reason we stayed so close was our shared love of gaming, and making time a couple of nights a week to sit down, connect to Skype and blow the shit out of each other on various online games. There’s no way any of us would spend a solid three or more hours on the phone, talking about our day, the latest news or gossip, or just random crap without the interface of a game, a shared activity we all enjoyed.

Essentially, despite the scaremongering Jack Thomson and all the other anti-gaming advocates, I thoroughly believe that I owe the two most enduring and rewarding friendships I have, to gaming.

Say what you want guys, but the Examiner guys are getting paid. Anyways, on with the blog.

Hello! and welcome to Tavendale's blog, sponsored by MSNBC! I dont really have anything to post about, but I can probably fill a couple of paragraphs.

Today I'm goin to work. It sucks, because that means can't watch MSNBC! However, I'll be back in the evening to do one of threIe Blog Posts I had ideas for. It will be titled BB Project Log, My Threesome or WHY I LOVE THE MSNBC NIGHTLY NEWS WITH BRIAN WLLIAMS!

I'm not sure which yet, but I thought I should let y'all know.

TtYLMSNBC

(I'm sorry, I need to pay for teh games!)

So I paid the stupid amount (£40!) for the early digital distribution of the Blood Bowl game. I had to. I’m impatient and was incredibly excited for this game. You knew this, we’ve already talked about this. You see, I know Blood Bowl. I love Blood Bowl. I’ve long been a fan and player of the board game on which the new videogame is based. The board game is a mix of American Football and the miniature wargame, Warhammer. The game is also set in the Warhammer world, albeit a more comic interpretation.



It’s probably the best game that Games Workshop has ever produced and it most definitely my favourite. There are a wide selection of teams available and i tend towards the Orcs. I’m not going to post a picture of my Orc team, as I’ve been using the same one for many years and the paint job is a bit crappy. I’m halfway through painting up some Lizardmen and have recently purchased a themed Human team from a different manufacturer. I wanted something a little different, so I got myself a team of Nuns from a small Australian company.



You may have gathered by all this babbling that my expectations from this digital interpretation of my true (gaming) love would be rather high. Would the game offer a faithful translation of the classic board game? Would it allow me to relive the tabletop experience with geek friends who consider tabletop wargaming one nerdy step too far? Would it work?



No.

Now, I should qualify this. I stumbled into the ‘real time’ mode. This is quite a big step away from the board game’s turn-based origins and I wasn’t really ready to try that out. I gave it a shot and it left me disappointed. It wasn’t until a couple of days later that I would have another chance to play and to try out the classic, turn-based mode, based entirely on the official Blood Bowl rulebook (available for free for any who are interested). I had a quick shot as a Human team to try it out.



Yes. yes! A thousand times, yes! I am impressed. I am relieved. I am in love. The game is not an innovative re-imagining of a classic franchise. The game does not move Blood Bowl in exciting new directions. The game gives what it says on the tin. It is the Blood Bowl that I know and love, right down to the letter. I lost that first game, by the way, which further demonstrates the authenticity! I was actually surprised by the faithfulness of the translation. Although I lost the first game, I did score a touchdown with my Ogre, the dash for which I have captured for posterity:



So far, so good, right? The thing is, although one-off Blood Bowl matches are fun, the real enjoyment comes from fostering a team through a league. As the league progresses, you add players to your roster, level up and get skills for existing players, use the money you earn to pay cheerleaders, apothecaries and mercenary players (and to bribe the ref), and develop your team from a cookie-cutter mob of whatever race into a unique and personalised squad.

For my first campaign, I decided on a team I’d never tried in Blood Bowl, though I do play them in Games Workshop’s other games, Warhammer and Mordheim: the Skaven. Skaven are vicious mutants: Half man, half rat servants of the Great Horned Rat, ruled over by the Council of Thirteen. They are fast and fragile, though able to hire out a fearsome Rat Ogre, the foul creations of the Master Shapers of Clan Moulder. The bulk of my team would be made up of clanrats pressed into service as Linemen, backed up by a Catcher, two Stormvermin and two of Clan Eshin’s swift and evasive Gutter Runners:



I’m not far into this campaign, having won only the first cup. I have played numerous matches, however, and have noticed that AI is somewhat brutal. The tactics it employs don’t seem to differ much from race to race, however, and I found myself facing diverse teams (such as slow-and-steady Dwarfs and another Skaven team), all employing the same strategies.

Visually, I’ve heard complaints from some parties, but I don’t see any issues. The graphics are great and the models are well detailed. There aren’t many extra effects though, and although I admit that weather, motion blur or similar tricks would have been nice touches, they are not necessities and the target audience, used to playing with pieces of metal on a cardboard pitch, can probably cope without them.

The music is good, and fits the game well. It changes based on what’s happening too, most noticeably when a player is nearing a touchdown and the crowd really starts to cheer on their team. The real highlight sound-wise, however, is the commentary.Sure, you might get a little tired of it as there is a rather limited selection of phrases, but it adds a lot to the feel of the game and is genuinely funny.

Click here, here and here for mp3 clips.

The game is a bit buggy. There are a number of small bugs, but the biggie is the crashing on load screens. In a recent patch, all players had their resolutions reset to one the developers though to be optimal. I really don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to play the game at 1920×1080, which is offered in the menu, but until it’s fixed, a lower resolution will be ok. There’s also the issue that if someone drops (or crashes) out of an online game before it loads (i.e. before the game starts), the game considers this a draw, which I guess would be quite annoying if you’re on a winning streak and the other guy drops out. Hopefully this will be addressed too.

Overall, I am delighted with the game and the faithfulness to the source material. It’s not perfect though. In terms of bugs and a lack of more advanced visual effects, the game could use a bit more polish. As flaws go, one is fixable and the other is most likely unimportant to the core fanbase the game is clearly aimed at. The real time more is an odd beast and although I’m steering clear of it for now, I could well see myself dipping back in and trig to get the hang of it. This is a game I intend to play for a very long time, though it will not replace the board game in my affections. This is as close an emulation as I could have hoped for, but it does not replace the feeling of painting and using your own miniatures in games against other painted teams, fielded by similarly enthused collectors. I am delighted by this game, but I’m not packing away my board just yet.