Games of Gencon

This is just going to be a few brief notes on some of the new games I played at GenCon. I pretty much enjoyed most of the games I played there, but these are the ones that I hadn't played before that stand out in my memory.

On Thursday I played a few rounds of Khet with a guy called Jason. Khet has an Egyptian theme, and the aim is to use the mirrors on the pieces to shoot your laser beam onto the opponents pharaoh. Each turn you can move a piece one step or rotate it 90 degrees, and then you shoot your laser beam. If you hit a piece other than on the mirror, it gets removed. The advanced version which includes a beam splitter for each side makes it even more interesting.

On Friday I got to have a go at the Battlestar Galactica board game, which is a pretty well done game. It is for the most part a cooperative game, where all the players work together against the game itself, with the complication of that at some point some of the players will be working against the other players and be trying to destroy the ship. Each player takes the role of a character from the show, each of which has strengths and weaknesses appropriate to their character. In this game I played a pilot character, and so mostly worked on protecting the ship from the enemy, and was not able to contribute as much to the crisis portion of the game, where the group has to work to resolve a problem. In the end we did work out who was the cylon, and we managed to get away from the bad guys, making the game a win for the humans.

On Saturday I played Chaos in the Old World, a game based on the Warhammer fantasy world. This is an asymmetrical four player game, with each player representing one of the four chaos powers trying to corrupt the world. I played Khorne, who is good at combat, but not so good at corrupting or manipulating the world. Through spreading my forces thin and not caring whose guys I killed (for the most part, although there was some targeted attacks) I managed to raise my threat level to where I won the game, although it was a very close run thing as one of the other players also got to 50 points that turn, another possible victory condition, and it's only because the threat level victory has priority over the points victory that I got the win. The win was especialy close as I had a terrible battle round that turn and only killed something by the skin of my teeth.

On Sunday I played Red November. This is another cooperative game. In the game, the players are a bunch of drunk gnomes on a run down submarine trying to keep it afloat until rescuers arrive in 60 minutes. As the game progresses fires break out, sections flood, things break down, kraken squash the ship and more. It gets even more fun when a gnome passes out drunk and a bunch of stuff happens with fewer people left to fix it. This is a fun game with a good theme.

GenCon

Most of last week I was doing something or other related to GenCon, which is a big gaming and media convention here in Brisbane (when I say big, I'm grading on a curve). I started out on Wednesday going in to help out with the setting up, but since a bunch of the stuff they needed didn't show up, I didn't do much more during the day then help unpack a truck and a few cars and push some trolleys around. I also got to see just how big the Brisbane Convention Centre is. At one point there was a semi trailer just driving around inside.

Thursday was a bit more organised as stuff was starting that day. Early on I was packing showbags which weren't exactly the greatest showbags of all time, as they contained one program, one catalog, and two business cards. Things like pens and dice and hats had to be bought. After lunch, sneakily provided unasked for by the convention centre and consumed before anyone realised the insane price charged for said lunch. After lunch I started on my main role there, helping out in the board game section. At the start there was just myself and another regular from Critical Mass on Fridays, so we hung around and as people wandered by started a few games of different things, and kept on playing games until it was time to pack stuff up at around 9:30.

Friday was again mostly board games after I got there around twoish as I had to deal with centrelink and pick up my repaired computer. I played one game of Battlestar Galactica which was quite good, and I got into character quite well, but I played things a little too straight for my own good if I'd turned out to be a cylon later on in the game. In the evening while walking around the exhibitor half of the hall I bought a Dread Pirate Roberts action figure and a print of an artist's rendition of the Serenity poster.

Saturday was an easier day with a few games. The days highlight was the Q & A with Robert Picardo, who was very entertaining. The lowlight was when I went across the river to the Myer centre to buy lunch for a reasonable price (the convention centre charges $4 for a bottle of softdrink) only to find out my credit card was missing. Fortunately, I had left it at the subway I'd gone to for dinner the last two nights and the guy recognised me and had the card there.

Sunday was the final day and I did a little more shopping and a little more gaming. I bought a copy of the Battlestar Galactica game for myself, as well as a copy of the new Iain Banks (no M) book. Finally as the con came to a close I helped pack up all the games into the car of the board game area coordinator, and then told to get out as no one gave me a safety jacket which was needed after the con closed.

All up it was a good 4(5) days and I'll definitely be involved next year in some form.

Paintball

Last weekend I went to paintball. I found out about it from a group I found on facebook which is trying to build up a bit of a community here in Daegu. Anyway, onto the actual day. It started with all the people congregating in downtown Daegu. Here the organization could have been a little better. We ended up waiting around about an hour for some people who were late. We also got screwed over with the bus. The organizers booked a bus for 35 people and they turned up with a bus for 30 people. This was really bad since it meant two of the organizers had to miss out.

We eventually got to the paintball course where I was pleasantly surprised to find that the amount of gear provided was more than I expected. In addition to a mask and gun, we also got overalls, gloves and a padded vest. This meant I no longer had to worry about getting a lot of paint all over my own clothes.

After kitting up we had a brief introduction to how to use the guns which was translated from Korean. A few practice shots and we were sent into the field. The field was a small patch of scrub in between a highway and a marine base with a lot of barrels and walls placed around the place. We did six rounds with three different games, kill or be killed, capture the flag and kill the VIPs. Blue team won the first game, but we lost the rest.

In the first capture the flag I just hung back and guarded the flag, but in the second I was more aggressive, although I got screwed over by my gun. I went on a mad dash forward and stopped at one of the walls. I looked through the window and had a clear shot but my gun had jammed. As I ducked down and tried to reset it, I got shot by the guy on the other side. In the later games I also tended towards kamikaze runs near the end, since once you ran out of bullets, you were counted as dead. So, once I realized I only had half a dozen bullets left, I'd go for the mad charge towards the objective with my gun held high in front of my face so I was harder to hit. I never actually made it to a target, but it was fun to go charging through the scrub.

All in all it was a good day, and if another day of paintball is planned I'll definitely go along again.
Guarding the flag.
The Mighty Blues

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The Third Devil

Blizzard has announced that they will be releasing Diablo 3. The only downside is that even more of my time will be sacrificed to Blizzard.

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Current media: Bullshit! 6x02

A Hat Full of Media

I've got a few different bits of media from the last few weeks that I have a little bit to say about, so I'm going to collect them all here in no specific order.

The Okinawa Reading List.
The books I read on my trip to Okinawa were as follows: Foundation and Empire, Freakonomics, The Little Prince, and Absurdistan.

Foundation and Empire is an oldy and a goody, although I prefer the first of the Foundation novels. From the second book onward, it concentrates more on the individuals whereas the first had a feeling of more impersonal, grandiose history unraveling as you read. Although to be honest, I'm not sure that could be kept up over the course of a thousand years with the same level of quality.

Freakonomics was interesting, but unfulfilling. It lacked a certain amount of depth. I think I expected it to be a weightier, more serious and academic tome than it really was.

The Little Prince I added to the list since John Paul showed me the French copy he was carrying around with him on his travels. An interesting tale which definitely made me think about things (some of which I may be better of not thinking about).

I'm still reading Absurdistan, which is about a fat Russian guy who gets mixed up in a civil war in the former soviet republic of Absurdistan. It's not bad, but I'm not sure what point the author is trying to make.

Also in Okinawa I started playing Phoenix Wright. This is a lawyer RPG type game. The game play has two sections, investigation where you talk to witnesses and look for evidence, and the courtroom where you cross examine witnesses and present evidence to show the holes in the witnesses' testimony. An interesting game, although it is quite linear in play, sometimes the evidence to present and when is quite arbitrary, and now that I've finished it I doubt I'll play it again any time soon. That said, I will probably buy Phoenix Wright 2 after payday.

I've already talked about Die Hard 4 and Pirates 3, so I won't do so further. I am going to try and see Transformers and Harry Potter 5 in the near future while they are still showing in the cinemas.

Today I got my hands on the final Harry Potter book, and am already 100 pages in. I don't expect to get much sleep tonight, as I'll probably get to around 2 am and think, damn, I should get some sleep. I'll probably comment a bit more when I finish it.

Lastly, I found a link to this on Neil Gaiman's blog, Peanuts by Charles Bukowski. This appeals to my fondness for the reinterpretation of stories with a different, more twisted perspective. This is very different to the original, but very good.

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Writing time: 28 minutes
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Current media: Apocalyptica - Faraway

Wikipedia 1, Japanese sales staff 0

As part of my acquiring Opera for the DS, I had to decide how much I trusted Wikipedia. The sales staff at the store told me that any DS game acquired in Japan would not work on my DS from Australia. On my first visit I took their word for it, as I didn't know any better.

The next day I read up on the DS at Wikipedia to see if I could maybe at least use US games on mine, and found out that any DS will play a cartridge from any country (there is an exception with China, but that doesn't affect me).

So now I had to decide how much I trusted Wikipedia. As most people know, I am a big fan of Wikipedia, have contributed a bit, use it for most basic fact checking, and more. But this was the first time my money was on the line. I decided that I trusted Wikipedia with ¥3410, and bought the DS Browser, which as you can see is working in my Australian DS.

So, final score, Wikipedia 1, Japanese sales staff 0.

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Browsing on a DS

Today I bought Nintendo DS Browser. I made this purchase to offset my lack of a computer for another few weeks. So far the browser is OK. It's rendering is a bit iffy, but that is a factor of the screen size.

Input is a little slow, and the handwriting recognition is almost painfully so. I think I'll stick with the keyboard on the screen, which I don't have to wait while it decides which letter I've just written.

Blogger doesn't seem to want to let me log on with the DS, so I'm using the feature that lets you email your entries in, since I can use gmail.

There's a few more sites I need to try to see if I can get by without visiting an internet cafe every day or two (it doesn't show all the pictures on a page, so I'll have a backlog of comics to read).

Anyway, I want to play around a bit more, so I'll wrap up now.

New Toy

So after three months my new toy has arrived. Three months ago it arrived at my old house in Brisbane, about one month after I'd left. Today I picked up my Nintendo DS from the post office here in Japan and having been playing with it nearly every chance I've had since. I got one game with it, Super Mario DS, which is pretty fun. It doesn't use the stylus and touch screen much, but I'm sure other games will.

Anyway, since this has taken me about 16 minutes to write (I decided to play another level of Mario), I'm going to stop typing and start playing.

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Current media: Super Mario DS