The latest MTG duel deck to be released is Sorin vs Tibalt. I purchased it and have played the two decks against each other to see how they match up. Here’s my results…
Sorin’s deck uses the Sorin, Lord of Innistrad card from the Innistrad set, and the theme of the deck seems to be ‘tokens, vampires and lifelink’. As played, it was a fast deck with quite a bit of evasion (fliers, mostly) and some strong removal.
Tibalt’s deck uses his only appearance so far, Tibalt the Fiend-Blooded as the Planeswalker, and the deck utilizes hosted creatures, sacrifice effects and strong but optional direct damage (such as Browbeat.
In the four games I played, Sorin won handily every time. In two of the games, he won 20-0! This is as close to a mismatch as any duel deck I’ve played in the last few years, with Tibalt lacking both the speed and the removal to deal with Sorin’s creatures even if Sorin didn’t have lifelink!
In many of the games, Sorin had 2 or more flying spirit tokens out very quickly and Tibalt had little defense. A card like Lingering Souls could turn the game if drawn early, and often did.
Sometimes Tibalt gave a good fight (notable cards strong in this matchup: Vithian Stinger, Sulfuric Vortex), but usually Sorin managed to cast some evading lifelinker and turn things around very quickly.
As far as a well matched pair of decks therefore, this product gets a thumbs down!
However, as a product I’ll give this one a definite thumbs up. Personally, I owned neither Planeswalker, so it was nice to be able to get them both in one product. Secondly, a few of the other cards in the decks are nifty and I’m glad I now own copies. I’ll give a specific mention here to Phantom General, which had been notably absent from my white soldier token deck!
And of course, from my perspective, I had to get this anyway for the basic land 🙂
This past Tuesday, Florence was in town! Since she lives in the desert now, we don’t get to hang out much, so the most had to be made of it.
The decision of what to do was easy: it was time to launch model rockets!
“What, what?!” you ask? Well, I had kept it a cunning secret that Florence had purchased me model rocket supplies for Christmas, knowing this day would eventually come. Here’s a rare shot of me assembling one of the rockets a few weeks ago:
There were three in total. Before her trip I built everything and made sure it was all ready to go. A scouted out a location and bought a few extra engines. Very soon, I was to send an emissary into the cold, dark depths of space! And the very first said emissary would be no less than ‘KUMA 01‘, the bear-rocket:
We launched in Delmar park, near my house. The weather, as you can see, was perfect. KUMA is a little rocket, and it had a B-4 engine in it. What does that mean? Who knows! We certainly didn’t. I think you can gauge from this launch video how high we expected this rocket to go:
It went so high! And there was apparently a wind up there, since it traveled quite a distance (via the parachute) before touching down. In the future, remind me to snip a hole in the parachute prior to launch. Happily, KUMA survived the trip intact:
Giddy with success, it was time to move on to the big rocket, LOADSTAR. This guy is designed to carry a payload, and has a (frankly ludicrous) dual-stage that requires two engines. It was also a total bastard to assemble, and I had less than 1% confidence it would survive a landing. Here it is ready to be launched:
The launch was spectacular… ly bad! As I half-expected, the second stage failed to ignite, and therefore the re-entry mechanism did not deploy. LOADSTAR fell like a stone, nose first, into dirt:
Although it failed, I was amazed it survived intact. Kudos to gorilla glue, I suppose! I will tinker with LOADSTAR and try launching him again one day.
And then we moved onto what was perhaps the craziest of the three rockets, ATOMOS. And yes, I just made up that name one second ago. At any rate, here’s a few shots of the pre-launch procedure:
This rocket carries two shuttles, which detach at the zenith, and then glide to earth (probably bearing messages from God). This rocket kit had existed in my car for a millenia, and was actually damaged when I built it. If LOADSTAR was expected to fail, ATOMOS was expected to explode!
What’s that? The thing in the top left of the above shot? Here’s a closeup:
OMG it’s Florry, hiding behind a plastic lid because she was scared after the LOADSTAR tragedy 🙂
I had put a stronger engine into this guy, a C-5. What does that mean?? Who knows! Let’s launch:
HOLY MOTHER OF GOD IT WENT HIGH! You can see from that photo (taken on my phone…), this rocket had purpose. It raced up, screaming through the troposphere, writing “Goodbye fair Earth” with its exhaust. Maybe. At any rate, it was an amazing launch, one of the shuttles even worked correctly (the other fell like Icarus) and both the rocket and both shuttles were recovered intact.
There was only one engine left. A strong one; a C-5. It made sense to put it in the smallest, lightest rocket. KUMA 01 was on a one-way trip to infinity and beyond!
The final launch was so momentous it required two people. This may have been because the launch device had two buttons, and we both wanted to photograph the rocket as it was taking off. We hid behind our plastic shield, said a quick prayer, and pushed the button. This happened:
Look at that power! Look at it:
It was like all the angels got beneath this little bear-rocket and lifted to heaven at faster than light speed! It just went so fast, and so high, and penetrated the atmosphere and we never ever saw little KUMA again…
…at least not until he touched down safely a minute or so later 🙂
As you may be able to tell this was big fun. I already have some ideas for my second round of rocketry later this summer.
Thank you Florence, both for the rockets and for helping me launch them. 🙂
This past week, Nintendo removed the Nintendo DS from it’s future sales projections. This is as good a sign as any from them that the system has been ‘retired’ and is likely no longer being produced. Although it is still in stores (and selling respectably, at least in America), it is likely that by the end of this year it will be completed replaced by the 3DS.
The DS was released back in 2004. Upon launch, it was an ugly duckling, especially compared to the then reigning handheld, the Gameboy Advance SP. This is what the DS looked like when it was first released:
On the day of US release, November 21 2004, I bought two systems (one for KLS), and one game. The game was Super Mario DS, a rerelease of the Gamecube classic. I hadn’t played it in years, and enjoyed playing it again on the DS. But there was no question, in those early six months or so, that this was a troubled system.
After about a year though, the games started coming out at a good pace, and some system classics were released early in the lifespan. This included Castlevania and Advance Wars games (the latter still without a sequel…), and Animal Crossing and the ‘games’ that would skyrocket the system to popularity: Nintendogs and Brain Age.
Back then – in mid 2006 – the system could do no wrong. It was the most successful game system of all time, raking in massive profits for Nintendo and with developers lining up to put games on it. This was the start of the golden years for DS; what would perhaps be the best years of any game system.
I liked the DS from the start, but by the time developers had gotten their minds around the system and fully fledged games (as opposed to two-screen inflated demos) started coming out it had become perhaps my favourite system of all time. One after another, fantastic games were being released. I bought them all; I played them all.
The system went through a few iterations: DS Lite, DSi, DSiXL. I bought them all, and to this day own 6 different DS systems. I took advantage of the lack of regional lockouts and bought games in the US, Australia, England and Japan, and own more foreign software for the DS than for any other system. I was buying games for it at a rate of almost 3 per month, and for many years it dominated my game time.
To date, Nintendo has sold 153 million DS units, and 933 million units of software have been sold. That’s an average of a little over 6 per owner. This number seems alarmingly small to me, since I own261 different DS games, and couldn’t begin to imagine how to distill my collection down to only 6 ‘must-haves’.
But I shall try. In no particular order then, my six favourite Nintendo DS games:
Elite Beat Agents – the best music game ever made, hands down. This was based on the Japanese original, Ossu Tatakae Ouenden, itself a magnificent game (as it its sequel). But this English language all-new installment is the best of the series.
The World Ends With You – Incredibly hardcore and detail-oriented RPG set in Shibuya, Japan featuring a mind-bending story, fantastic music and one of the best combat engines ever made. It’s available on iOS, but the long-rumoured sequel is MIA.
Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City – Impossibly, the ‘wizardry’ game type was resurrected on the DS to great success. I could have probably filled this list with six such games (including Dark Spire, Wizardry Asterisk, several Shin Megami Tensei games etc.) but the one series to rule them all is Etrian Odyssey. The best DS installment was the third, but I’m glad to say the series is going strong and the fourth game, recently released on the 3DS, is on my shelf waiting to be played 🙂
Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier – Yes I know you’ve never heard of this unlikely spin-off from a series that will never be released outside of Japan due to copyright hell. But this was a fantastic and very lighthearted traditional RPG with a great story, incredible 2D animation and some really striking character designs. I loved it to death, and wish Atlus would release the sequel! (Incidentally this game was released in very limited quantities and is a pricey collectible now.)
Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels Of The Starry Skies – Hundreds of hours of gameplay and oodles of dungeons to explore, bosses to kill and loot to collect make this perhaps the best traditional RPG on the system.
Animal Crossing: Wild World – The best Animal Crossing yet (well…) came out early in the DS’s life. I played it daily for almost a year 🙂
All told, I own just shy of 1400 games for 26 different systems. It’s remarkable that almost 20% of those games are for only one of the 26 systems. The DS may be discontinued now, but I don’t doubt I’ll still be buying games for it in the years to come, and I don’t doubt that I’ll still be playing DS games for many, many years 🙂
Amongst other things, I got this game for my birthday:
It’s the third of the Dungeons & Dragons boardgames released in the past few years. I’ve read almost every one of the the Drizzt novels, so I was interested to see how this game worked out. Of course the fact it can be solo played only made it more interesting…
It took some time to get it ready for play. There are a lot of tokens to punch out of 15 pieces of thick cardstock:
Some of these are adventure specific, and therefore are not used in every game since you play one of many adventures included in the box. But a good amount of these are required, and punching them all out, then sorting them and getting ready for play took an hour at least. In addition to the above there are also two decks of cards that represent abilities, items, or contain monster statistics.
Here are all the miniatures that come with the game:
Lots of beasties! Again, you’ll only use a few of these each adventure, but it’s cool there is such a variety. You’ll note in the above and later photos that some of mine were a bit squished (look at the dragon in the photo above). If I wanted to straighten them I suppose I’d need a hairdryer…
I chose one of the beginner adventures: ‘Secrets of the Underdark’, which was for 2-5 characters. I chose three: Drizzt himself, as well as Catti-Brie the archer and Wulfgar the barbarian. Familiar names, if you’ve read the books. My adventure was a standard ‘dungeon crawl’ until I reached a particular spot in the Underdark which would trigger a battle with a random villian (chosen from the Drizzt novels baddie roster). If I defeated the villian, I would win. If any of my guys died, I would lose.
Gameplay consists of drawing random dungeon tiles and placing them onto the board, forming an increasingly larger playing surface as the game proceeds. When you draw tiles all sorts of things can occur, from revealing a monster (common) to setting off traps or finding items (less common). Any monsters on the board are hostile, and must be defeated before they kill you. The player controls his characters as well as the monsters, using specific commands on each monster card as a form of rudimentary monster AI.
Played proceeded smoothly for the first few rounds, with any monsters I revealed being 1-hit-wonder goblins. Then this guy turned up (the monster deck is random):
The little green guy is a goblin (who was ineffective by now; read the AI on his card) but the purple drider was bad news! A streak of apalling dice rolls led to the drider actually reducing Wulfgar the barbarian – my guy with the most health – to 0 hitpoints. He wasn’t dead yet, due to a ‘healing surge’, but the use of one of my (only!) two healing surgers was unexpected and unwelcome. The drider dead, I moved deeper into the dungeon…
Combat is fun. All resolutions are done with a single die, and there are many items and abilities and tactics that can be used. I tended to have it somewhat easy against the majority of foes since I focused 3 vs 1, but I imagine in a multiplayer game where everyone goes off on their own things would get hairy very quickly. In my case this didn’t happen until I revealed the ‘Drow Glyph’ dungeon tile, which triggered the endgame. Here’s what the board looked like when legendary assassin Artemis Entreri made his grand appearance with a cadre of drow combatants:
This was bad, bad news. Suddenly I was 3 vs 4, and one of those 4 (Artemis) had a sword that let him regenerate 25% of his health every successful attack! I focused on his lackeys and took them down mostly using Wulfgars berserker attack which hits multiple foes.
Here is the state of the board at this point from a longer angle. My one criticism of the game is the large amount of space needed to hold all the cards that are used. Although this wouldn’t have been as much an issue were I not soloing the adventure. You can see though if I had played 5 characters I wouldn’t have had the room.
In the end I defeated Artemis and won the adventure. It was hard fought though, since Artemis concentrated on Wulfgar and took him to 0 again quickly, requiring use of the final healing surge (and also a healing potion). Wulfgar fled after that, and led Drizzt and Catti-Brie finish Artemis off, which itself took many more turns than I would have expected due to the healing sword. But, a win is a win!
Overall a good game, and well worth the reasonable cost (I got it for about $35) I think. Now what about the third game they released…
