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The Star, The Tower, Judgement

Wednesday, May 11th, 2011

I recently started playing the amazing Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together remake for PSP. When I bought it, a freebie deck of Tarot cards came with it. “Why not”, I thought, “do my own Tarot?”

So I did. I shuffled the 22 card deck and went with the relatively easy 3-spread reading. This entails drawing 3 cards randomly, where the first represents the past, the second the present, and the third the future.

Here are my results:

The Star (my past)

Keywords: Calmness, Tranquility, Hope

This card designates renewal of body and soul, and hope for the future. In the years past, it seemed, my future was bright!

The Tower (my present)

Keywords: Chaos, Crisis, Downfall

This card is an ill omen, foretelling calamity. This is my present, thus the future looks grim.

Judgement (my future)

Keywords: Forgiveness, Salvation, Absolution

This card may represent the imminent resolution of decisions delayed or put aside. It may also represent the return of old friends, or even old situations. However, some believe it represents a preoccupation with the past. This is my future. Will my future be my past?

I am a man of science, and do not believe in mysticism. However I must be honest with you, my dear reader: before doing this reading I removed two cards from the set of 22.

Posted in Family, Games, The Unknown | Comments Closed

New Phyrexia Prelaunch

Monday, May 9th, 2011

On Saturday night SFL and I played in the prelaunch for the new Magic The Gathering expansion called New Phyrexia.

It was unusually unpopular. There were only 12 entrants, compared to 30+ for every other prelaunch I’d been to. Reading online it seems the reasons were a mix of college exams, mother’s day weekend and the fact that this was the third expansion in the ‘block’ (and some players are therefore sick of this block).

Neither of us were particularly enthused about the cards we pulled from our 3 Scars Of Mirrodin and 3 New Phyrexia boosters. I had the intent of playing some weird deck like mono-blue or red/black but a stunning lack of creatures more or less forced me into green/black. I have a distinct memory of playing this at the last prelaunch as well.

All told I played 11 games, and won 5 of them. It was about half-way through the evening when I realized how simple my deck actually was. Of the 40 cards (including land) I had only 3 uncommons and but a single rare. Furthermore, it wasn’t even a New Phyrexian card! It was this guy:

And what made my wins particularly absurb was that despite me playing an infect deck, not one of my victories was due to poison! In fact almost all were because of the above card, which I luckily drew – and got to play – in almost every game.

The most useful New Phyrexian cards I saw on Saturday night were not in my deck. When played by others, I was particularly amused by how effective these two were:

In prereleases it is not uncommon to go a few turns without casting anything due to the underpowered (and very random) decks. Therefore cards like the above (which seem overcosted normally) are very viable. In one game I was mana-starved in a big way, choosing to play with a hand of only 2 land and then not drawing any for many turns. By the time I had drawn my third land my opponent had the parasite out and basically won the game on it’s ability.

And Norn’s Annex is just nasty!

We played the four qualifying rounds, but then left since it was very late. They were cutting to top eight at that point, and the winner was still going to get a box of boosters. Not bad for a tourney with only 12 entrants 🙂

All in all it was a lot of fun, perhaps even the most fun prerelease yet. Here’s looking forward to MTG 2012…

Posted in Games, Miscellaneous | 1 Comment »

Brave New World

Sunday, May 1st, 2011

That iPad MMO I tweeted about yesterday? Here’s my character, right after her creation:

Here she is fighting a crocodile:

The game reminds me a lot of vanilla WoW. It has all the trappings including guilds, grouping, crafting, auctions, quests, talent trees (I’m fire), gryphons teleporting, maps etc.

In fact one of the reasons I’m playing the hell out of it is because I wouldn’t be surprised if Blizzard shut it down due to copyright infringement 🙂

Here’s Momomo checking out the first town:

When an MMO can look, play and control this well on a phone (yes, the app is universal) – I have to believe the ‘big boys’ of the industry would be silly to not be a little concerned.

Posted in Games, Otaku | Comments Closed

Game Dev Story

Saturday, April 30th, 2011

Game Dev Story is a charming iOS game that has had me hooked for the better part of the last week.

In the game you run a game company, and your goal is to succeed in the competitive world of the game industry. You choose which games to make (style and genre) and which system to make them for and then release them and hope they succeed! With success comes money and the opportunity to hire more and better staff. Eventually you’ll be upgrading your offices, making sequels to hit games, winning industry awards and even releasing your own console.

The above shows the first console I developed, the strikingly named Satan Engine. This was 17 years into the game, and in real-world-equivalent times this 64-bit Blu-ray drive monster was going up against 16 bit offerings from ‘Senya’ and ‘Intendro’. Obviously I wiped the carpet with them, quickly gaining 26% of the market. (The slightly blurred graphics are because I am playing an iPhone game at double-size on the iPad)

This was helped of course by my launch game:

Since Acrosatan X I have released a few other games, including a ‘music’ style game in the genre ‘cuties’ (called Pantsu Dreaming) that scored 40/40!

Even so, it was the long awaited sequel to Beating Jesus (BS: I expect a comment on this) that would be my first Game Of The Year. I guess those F1 Driving fans are more numerous than I thought?

The game is very cute and light-hearted, and one nice element is that there are certain… unusual staff members that can periodically be available for hire. The best is this guy:

Yep, Grizzly Bearington the legendary bear-producer. At his job interview, he said he had left the woods in search of honey! He’s perhaps not the most skilled employee I have, but he certainly brightens the office with his presence:

I’ve sunk many hours into Game Dev Story, and considering it was only $1.99 (on sale from $3.99) it’s well, well worth the price. There are few enough Japanese developed games on the US App Store, but considering the quality of this one (and the Cave shooters) I can only hope we’ll see more in the future.

Posted in Games, Otaku, Pets, Tech | 2 Comments »

Mega Mantis

Thursday, April 21st, 2011

My brother got me this kit for my birthday:

I just assembled it. The parts are all aluminium, and the nuts and bolts that hold everything together are tiny!

The instructions are clear and very nicely done, with a 1:1 scale list of parts on the other side. It is very easy to know how to put the kit together:

Actually putting it together was quite challenging though. It took me about an hour in total, and most of the time was consumed by trying to get nuts on the end of very tiny bolts with very little room in which to maneuver. Of course I was stubborn, and never went and got tweezers. This particularly step was by far the worst:

The springs are there to make the wings have a bit of ‘give’. Unfortunately although the kit has a lot of springs, none of the others do anything and are purely for visual impact, such as this one:

I did like how some of the parts were made of ‘soft aluminium’ (as described by the manual) and can be bent as the owner sees fit. The antennae are an example: