Many years ago, our family was on vacation with friends of ours. In the interests of mystery, I will refer to them only as the P-family. The vacation was a blast. We ran and we jumped and we ate lollies and we swam and the world spun merrily under our feet and all was good.
I don’t remember exactly how old I was at the time. Maybe 14 or 15?
We were staying, as I recall, in an ancient Australian abode that looked a bit like this:
It was open and windy. One of those old homes that spiders use as a highway and that didn’t even have a light in every room. The awning had kept the sunlight out for ever, and the whole place smelled of yesterday, and of dreams unfulfilled.
Late one night, whilst the parents discussed boring-parentish topic, the kids were all in one of the pentitential bedrooms playing cards. That would have been me, my brother, and the two eldest P-kids: BP and AP. The night was not young, and the wind was howling outside. We were sleepy, as we would have been after endless hours of running and jumping and eating.
We were playing, as I recall, gin rummy. The cards were dealt, and the top card turned over. This is what is was:
(well, not exactly that card… but read on!)
There was mutual dissatisfaction with the cards that had been dealt, and the decision was made to toss the hand and redeal. This was promptly done. Cards were collected, reshuffled, redealt and the top card was once again revealed.
And this is what it was:
There was unease in the room. The more craven amongst the group no doubt felt a flutter of fear in their souls, because even though we were children and couldn’t have possibly known the chance that this had occured was 0.034%, we certainly knew it was unlikely.
At this point, as I recall, the decision was made to end the game and go to bed. My memories become somewhat clouded at this point, as if some unknown agency was thwarting my recollection. Before ending the game, we mutually decided, we would deal one more hand just to reassure ourselves that it couldn’t happen a third time.
An eerie silence had descended upon the room. The air felt heavy and old. If I had been paying attention, I would have noted that the voices of our parents chatting from the living room had faded away, and that time has seemed to concentrate into that one room, specifically onto my hands holding the cards, slowly shuffling them…
There were two younger children as well. I recall the young boy (DP) was especially spineless, and gibbered a little as I carefully dealt out the cards, and placed the deck onto the floor in front of us. I couldn’t have possibly known how to calculate that the chance of a third-time repeat would be 0.00063%
An icy hand was placed on mine shortly before turning the final card. It belonged to AP, the P-girl. Her eyes implored me: “Please, don’t do it!”
But I did. Even then I had the soul of a man, and nothing as… material as a deck of playing cards could change that!
These days, MMO – or Massive Multiplayer Online – games are ubiquitous. Twelve million people play World of Warcraft, and over 70 million play Farmville. None of this would be possible without computers and the internet, which is why games of such scale and a relatively newcomer in human history.
However, massive gaming didn’t start in 1985 (with usenet), or 1995 (with the intertubes)… it was already existent in the form of PBM’s, or Play-By-Mail games.
Play-by-mail is a type of game system where the players submit ‘orders’ to a referee who processes them and sends ‘reports’ back to each use to update them on the state of the game. Because every players turn is processed automatically, strategy plays a large element: what will you do, and in which order will you do it. Rarely do you control a single unit in a game, so you must issue orders for every character/army/spaceship you control. PBM games of virtually any genre have been run since the 1960s, but they are most often strategy wargames as this style of game lends itself to a strictly regimented, turn-based system. The number of players in a single game varies, but can be up to hundreds. Some games have fixed length (X total turns), others run indefinitely. Earlier I was reading about a fantasy wargame that ran for 5.5 years and had about 470 total players!
As a child I used to read the ads in the back of Dragon magazine, or the various UK gaming mags, and my imagination would run wild. The games sounded so fanciful and exotic that I could only dream of playing. The costs however were prohibitive, so I never did.
Looking through those very same Dragon magazines today the cost seems even higher than they did 25 years ago. Even today I would baulk at $2 or even $5 per turn (weekly or monthly), but imagine how high that was back then? And $20 for a rulebook? This was in the days the entire D&D box set cost $12!
Over the years the onset of the internet dealt PBM gaming a blow, but not a killing blow. Games still are still being played and being ran, but now orders are most often issued via email or custom software. True PB-snail-mail games are still run though, although these days are rare.
I have never played a true PBM game, and likely never will. However my awareness – and fascination – has never diminished. Several years ago I did preliminary design for a PB-email game that I wanted to write with my brother, and when he finally gets his act together and obtains a iOS dev kit, the first game we create will also be a PB-email variant.
So who knows, maybe one-day I’ll finally get to play-by-email myself 🙂
Between the pre-release, a fat pack and a box I ended up buying and opening 50 boosters of Scars Of Mirrodin. For no other reason other than I’m the sort of person who does such things, I kept track of the cards I pulled from these boosters. Here’s the tally:
Commons
– 493 in total (obviously I miscounted somewhere…)
– an average of about 4.9 of each common in the set
– The most of any common was 10 (Scoria Elemental), the least 1 (Blade-Tribe Berserkers)
Uncommons
– 153 in total (50 x 3 + 3 bonus foils)
– an average of about 2.5 of each uncommon in the set
– I did get every uncommon card
– 3 of each of Myr Galvanizer and Palladium Myr!
– only one Memnite 🙁
Rares
– 47 in total
– an average of about 0.90 of each rare in the set
– Of the 53 different rares, I got 38 of them
– I got 3 of one rare: Shape Anew
– One pack contained two (one foil) rares
Mythic Rares
– These were the ones I got: Koth Of The Hammer (x2), Geth, Lord Of The Vault, Elspeth Tirel, Mox Opal
Conclusion: collation in a box of MTG boosters is surprisingly good. I received a far greater variety of rare cards than one would expect were the packs truly randomly distributed. So in short, if you are interested in obtaining a large variety of different cards then a box seems to be the way to go.
(Addendum: after opening all my packs and failing to pull a Mindslaver I caved and purchased one online for a mere $2.99!)
(Addendum 2: Every card in this post found its way into one of my decks. Yes, even the ‘bad’ ones like Tower Of Calamities and Golden Urn. C-c-c-c-combo!)
If you read my twitter, you’ll have noticed (?) we spent yesterday at the New York Comic Con.
Before I start I will get this out of the way: there were too many people there! Although the organizers had booked the entire convention center (the con spanned 3 floors) the sheer amount of attendees was just enormous. Very, very quickly the main convention was clogged with people, making the simple act of just walking the aisles looking at the exhibitors a real chore. I’m not sure how they could avoid this aside from selling fewer tickets (which they won’t). Maybe the solution is to next year buy a three day pass and try to take it in smaller doses across a few days.
Anyway, that said, it was a blast – and a major upgrade from previous years.
What is the NYCC? It is a convention dedicated to comics, gaming, movies, anime and all associated forms of fandom. At the NYCC you can…
…buy comics (which I did!) or buy comic art. You can…
…buy toys or check out toys not yet released. You can…
…play games – both available and unreleased. You can also watch previews of movies of TV shows, meet ‘celebrities’, talk to many of the people that create comics today and goggle at the spectacle that is thousands (yes, thousands) of cosplayers. (More on that topic later).
Our day started early with a 5 am train to New York. We got to Penn Station around 8 and walked the 30 minutes or so to the convention center and joined the line. Here’s a shot of said line:
The line was hot and badly ventilated. Unlike previous years they had it double back onto itself, which meant we were not treated to the spectacle of the ‘professional’ Star Wars cosplayers known as the 501st entertaining the crowd. So the wait was a bit tedious… but at least it was fun seeing all the cosplayers (that’s a Servbot in the shot above).
Doors opened around 10, and the enormous crowd flooded into the main hall. The first thing that was obvious was how much bigger the con was. Roughly triple the size of last year, the scale of the event had clearly upgraded in a big way. Immediately inside the entrance was Ubisofts display for the upcoming Michael Jackson dancing game:
They had a massive crowd all day long because they frequently pulled cosplayers up to dance on the stage in front of everyone. I was a bit skeptical some of this was staged (what are the chances that some random Master Chief cosplayer happens to be a skilled dancer?) but it was fun nonetheless. Immediately behind this stage was the Capcom booth where Marvel vs Capcom 3 may have been the draw of the entire show. The crowds on that particular booth were so gigantic (watching versus matches on a gigantic screen, compete with play-by-play commentary) that it was difficult to even walk past.
And so on, and so on with the Wizards Of The Coast, Nintendo, Marvel and DC booths. Massive crowds at all of them, and the con had barely started. In previous years we’d scuttle around grabbing freebies – this year in many cases you had to earn them (by demoing products, filling out surveys etc.) I’ve no problem with that in principle, but with the lines how they were I wasn’t going to stand around waiting to earn a Golden Sun t-shirt that would have been free last year 🙂
The first celebrity we saw was James Marsters, who played Spike on Buffy. He was just in a booth posing for photos, maybe 10 feet away from us. We both were shocked by how old (wrinkled, haggard) he looked! Obviously makeup does wonders for his TV complexion! No matter, he seemed like a good sport as he posed with paying fans for photos.
Next we saw Simone Legno, creator of Tokidoki. His fame has skyrocketed in recent years, as his brand has become world famous and very, very popular. KLS didn’t rush for a ticket to get anything signed because she’d been lucky enough to have that done 2 years ago. Nonetheless we went and watched him as he was signing other items. Here’s a shot of him drawing a monster on a skateboard:
We also saw (and spoke with) Daphne Ashbrook, who played Grace Holloway in the Doctor Who movie. I declined, however, paying $25 for an autograph! (That’s the price of a Doctor!).
Here’s another celebrity we saw in the main hall:
Yes, it was amazing.
But we were especially stoked to see – in person – Rika Ishikawa. She is now in a band called hAngry x Angry with Hitomi ‘Yossie’ Yoshizawa. As in the girl we named our cat after. Anyway Yossie wasn’t at the con, but Rika was. We staked out a spot at the Kinokuniya booth to watch her meet with fans. Here’s a video of her being led in:
And here’s a blurry shot of her:
The no-photo nazis were relentless, but it was fun watching her meet her fans and sign whatever product they had brought. The line was substantial and seemed dominated by Japanese speakers. I believe they may have even come from Japan just to meet her at this event (I have read about some of the antics of Morning Musume superfans and I’m sure this would barely inconvenience some of them). It was a surreal moment…
Time for a lunch break!
And now it’s time for some cosplay!
For those unaware, ‘cosplay’ described dressing up as a character from a movie, game, book, comic, anime, manga etc. It’s been big in Japan for many years, and now seems to be just as big here in the US. We were both amazed at how many cosplayers there were at the con. Sometimes you’d look around and it seemed cosplayers outnumbered non-cosplayers. Here’s a gallery of some random ones I saw:
Of course it’s not all fans. There are a lot of professional cosplayers as well, hired by various companies to help attract people to their booths. Often these take the form of pretty girls:
I like to think my agreeing to pose with them is helping them do their job.
This next girl… well this next girl has a costume that… well I can only say I hope she was paid well:
I can’t stress enough just how many cosplayers there were. And the variety of outfits was dazzling and ram the gamut from anything to everything. The quality ranged from just awful to just amazing, with a healthy smattering of so-bad-it’s-good as well. For instance, here’s one of the latter:
Yep, it’s Ms Pac-Man (and yep, thats a dude). Here’s one of the amazing outfits:
That’s Master Chief from Halo. And he looked like he just walked off a film set.
My favourite two costumes were the following:
Similar in a way, aren’t they? Both were fantastic and very detailed, and the people wearing them were also very true to the characters. Let’s call the left one ‘Steampunk Iron Man’ and just take a look at it and be impressed by the design and manufacturing. The ultraman costume was equally (even moreso) impressive to me, and it had a light as well (the blue thing on the chest flashed). Kudos to both of these cosplayers, for showing the world what it means to be a man!
Random shot of a pretty girl:
She was working in a booth selling used games. Amongst their (very expensive) selections (most of which I own…) was a complete US Commodore 64 in the original box. It was only $80, and I should have gone back and bought it before leaving. That’s a missed opportunity right there…
And here’s me posing with Pedobear (yes it’s a joke):
We stayed at the con for over seven hours (over nine including our wait in line). We were both quite exhausted at the end, as were many other attendees. Such as this trio:
And as all good things do, the con came to an end for us around 6 pm as we said goodbye and headed back to the station for our train home. It was bigger and better than ever, and there’s no doubt we will return next year for NYCC 2011.
Tomorrow is the New York Comic Con 2010, and as we have the past two years, we’re taking a train down to New York City to attend.
It promises to be a madhouse this year (as if it wasn’t last year or the year before), especially since they are estimating over 100k people attending.
What surprises are there in store? Last year I met Colin Baker…
Anyway watch the twitter and (on Sunday) this blog for a full roundup!
