Since I know that none many of you are avidly ignoring following the progress of my MTG basic land collection, I have an exciting announcement!
Recently, from a source that will remain un-named, I came into possession of the best land card ever printed. I present to you, the APAC Blue Plains:
Yes that’s a real card. And yes I love it. And I’m guessing you do too 🙂
I’m sick and a bit miserable today, and spent the morning doing schoolwork. What better way to relax this afternoon than to crack open the new D&D Red Box and play through the solo adventure? As I do it I figure I’d review it as well, so you can decide if it is worth your $20…
As you can see, there is a fair amount of loot inside. The map folds out and will be used for the solo adventure. The two books (DM guide and players manual) are not very long (~35 pages on average) but are full colour and contains a lot of information. There are dozens and dozens of tokens and cards, but the quality could be higher (especially from the company that makes MTG). The dice are plain but functional. One of the better inclusions is not listed: four very attractive and full-colour character sheets.
The solo adventure is contained in the players manual, and is basically a 97-entry gamebook that you play through to create your character. I’ll be doing this first, so here goes…
I am instructed to take a few moments to imagine the basic information about my character, and to assign a name, gender and race. After a few moments, Jesper Richardson the male human is ready for adventure!
Immediately I am attacked by goblins, and I am given 6 different options as to what to do: melee, magic, backstab, healing, stealth or… something else. Without pause Jesper takes the last option (he’s thinking of perhaps mentally dominating the subhuman attackers) but… I am referred back to the previous entry in the absence of a DM.
Jesper casts a freezing burst spell and kills two of the three goblins instantly (I had to roll dice for this). Apparently I have chosen his role in life a wizard. I’m exposed to counterattack now, and find the combat mechanics a little too… not D&D. (At this point I’ll explain I own and have read all the 4e manuals and think D&D has strayed too far from it’s roots…)
Is that a typo in entry 21? Shouldn’t that AC be 10?
Scaring off the remaining goblins gave me 100 XP. In D&D 4e encounters are worth XP, as opposed to creatures. It is a subtle difference, but significant if you wish to consider how the game has changed.
Another error: I never got hit by a Goblin, so I skipped the entry that introduced hitpoints and constitution. Very inexperienced players would be extremely confused at this point if they had rolled my numbers. Not good, Wizards Of The Coast, not good!
The next few entries help establish the alignment of my character. Intriguingly, the game prevents the player from being evil-aligned. Interesting to see the current solution to the age-old argument of should players play evil characters is a straightforward “no”. Jesper himself is apparently good, although not too good. He will help the merchant retrieve what the goblins had stolen.
Oh, now they have a fix for the constituion problem from above. I still think the design could have been less confusing. These next few entries help decide my skills, which end up including History and Insight. Very fitting for a member of the “4e Diogenes Club”.
I’m in general impressed with how they have designed this product, although the actual ‘game’ part of the gamebook is more or less nonexistent. But it is a clever pseudo-randomizer for character design, and even introduces non combat skills. For instance, I just used my diplomacy skill to obtain the location of the major villian from a dying goblin.
In real life, Jesper would never do such a thing. He’d mentally dominate 🙂
Now I’m writing down all my equipment. How amusing that Jesper (and in fact every character) carries 50 feet of rope with him at all times! Good to see the inherent unrealism of even the mundane aspects of the game seems to have continued. A later entry requires a die roll to decide the additional language Jesper speaks, and – again appropriately – the result is “Deep Speech (the language of horrible monsters of the deep earth)”. I’m going to just go ahead and assume that Cthulhoids speak that as well!
Ok, now things get a little clumsy. Only in the penultimate entry does it tell me to open up the map, and instructs me to place myself and some goblins on the map and then fight them. Only rudimentary rules are provided, and it is more or less left up to me to carry out the fight. Here is a weakness in the product: a large component of D&D 4e is the tactical combat (played out on a map) and this introductory set does a very poor job of introducing this to the player. Thumbs down.
And that’s that for the player’s manual; a very brief introduction if ever I have seen one. Is it any good? Well it does a fair job of helping a new player create a character, especially by not overwhelming them with choices, but doesn’t do much of a job at all of introducing the combat. I suppose one could say that no D&D product ever has (since that is up to the DM and the game itself), but this is in nothing more than glorified character creation and in way a “solo adventure” (as it is advertised on the box). It barely even uses most of the contents of the box.
In other words, as a solo-game, this gets a failing grade.
On the other hand the DM guide seems fairly robust (it is about 60 pages, all in colour) and there certainly seems to be enough content in this entire package to design and run a decent introductory adventure for far less than the cost of buying all the hardcover manuals separately. So in that regard, I suppose this box set could be considered a success.
As a last comment, the nostalgia value of the product is much lower than the packaging may suggest. Very little beyond the box design harkens back to the red box of our youth. So don’t buy this thinking to rekindle old memories – this is strictly a cutely packaged introduction to D&D Fourth Edition.
To those that believe handheld gaming began with the Gameboy, I bring you the VFD electronic game:
The sights! The sounds! Especially the sounds 🙂
That video shows a game called Alien Attack, released by Tomy in the early 1980s. It was licensed by many other manufacturers, and in countries where copyright wasn’t so strong it was renamed Scramble to capitalize on the arcade game it had ripped off.
We owned it, and we loved it! Here’s a shot of what the game itself looked like:
It was technically portable, since it could be battery powered. VFD displays however are notoriously energy inefficient (at least the early ones of those days were) so we usually played using an AC Adaptor. Our version was differently coloured than the UK version seen above. If I recall, it was blue, orange and (mostly) white.
With one game and two players the situation was hardly satisfactory, and was shortly remedied with the aquisition of this guy:
Yep, Puck Monster by CGL! This was, as the name would imply, an excellent rip-off of the arcade game Donkey Kong Pac-Man. For me, it was even better than Scramble and I played the thing like I was possessed.
Here’s what it looked like in action.
I can remember playing these in bed with the covers over my head. I can remember playing them in cars during trips, playing them at the table during meals and even bringing them to school and playing them (or swapping with other people to play their games, such as Frogger or Dig Dug). I can even remember opening them, removing the screen and electronics, and playing sans case. These were all the rage from about 1981 to 1983, and were perhaps my favourite toys in those days.
So what happened to our VFD games? Perhaps my brother remembers?
And speaking of him, many of you probably know he lives in Silicon Valley. What you may not know is that Silicon Valley is rumoured to be the home of the world’s best used electronic stores specializing in 1980s games. Since this is the case, I figured I’d be easy on him this Christmas and rather than expect him to go and hunt for something impossible-to-find for his impossible-t0-buy-for brother, he could just nip down to one of those stores and pick me up a VFD game or two. In working order.
And boxed, of course 😉
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.
