"Skarboyz Biggest Fan"

So I've wanted to make Ork Vehicles for ages. Nothing too significant, something small and entertaining. I already have an old Space Marine or Imperial Guard Tank sitting about waiting to get Looted.

But it came to me in a flash of lightning. How the hell do teams get across the country? By Tour Bus. What's better than a Tour Bus? A Tour Squiggoth. And what do I have? A Squiggoth!


To boot, when the thought hit me, the image in my head had a little helicopter in the background with one of those streaming banners with “Blood Bowl” trailing behind. So Why not make a mobile of a Deffkotpa with a trailing banner?

I also keep seeing those scooters with trailers on the back with advertisements on them. So an Orc bike with a Blood Bowl Trailer? Game on!

Yes I know that they're both the wrong time period, but you know what? It's cool! I could scrounge up a few bits and bobs from Aarons old Orks bits, like his Trukks and whatnot and maybe buy a box or two of Deffkoptas from the GW shop and convert one of the Deffkoptas into a bike! Or just buy an Ork Bike, but that wouldn't be as cool.

That'd give me an excuse to make a Squiggoth Side Car with a Bike Slingshot, and a landing pad on top of the howdah.

And it's all Justified as Fan Factor.

Shock Horror! Its not a Game Warning

Tonight i post from my new phone, the Samsung Galaxy 5. Its my first smart phone and my first annoyance which i suspected from before getting the phone was the keypad is really annoying to use. Its because i have there large thumbs and the best way to type is by pressing very gently with the edge of my skin. Its harder than it seems. Because i have a lot of skin compared to these buttons with little surface. Either way, the phone is great use for contacting Jenny because it has skype. And the cheaper i can contact her, the better. I may even make it a regular thing.

But yes. With the demise of my previous phone which involved dropping it on a tiled dinosaurs and the screen shattering inside itself, it was nigh unusable except to accept calls and be notified when Jenny has sent me an email which id check through my laptop.

I hope you enjoyed the typo that predictive text has provided. I am sure the tiled dinosaurs will enjoy your company, not my tiled floors

Model Delivery

So I received my Bloodbowl team in the mail. The poor bag got wet and the packaging was falling apart in Adams hands as he handed it to me, but luckily the pewter was fine in their own plastic sealed bags.

Twelve models, with the only two doubles being my linemen, sit in front of me wanting to be cleared of flash. And they're not little bits of flash either, they're actually kinda chunky.

But they're here and they're ready. I've figured out a few names for them too. Few'shor O'brikk'hows is going to be my Fat Ork Blocker, Galgutz Eat'ch'ya is going to be the mucleclad Black Orc Runner. I call him a Black Orc Runner because the name comes from the Video game which Automatically generates names. And Galgutz, through his Career, has scored about 7 touchdowns before I upgraded to the Legendary Edition (And pretty much lost that team).

I also had Dubb'lin and Glaz'gow Eddbutz, the Blitzer brothers, and I figured the easiest way to tell them apart was to paint their faces in their respective countries flags (Green, white, Gold vertical stripes; blue with white cross). The two figures I've picked both look similar, and the other two don't look like them at all. One is raising his arm as if to catch something, and the other has a pair of sharp implements on.

All in all, it's a good day for Bloodbowl and in celebration I think I'm going to try and play that Dwarf Team again.

Fkn Deathroller with a ST of 7.

New York, New York

Over the course of about 6 days of sporadic play I finished Crysis 2. It seemed to go on forever, which I was somewhat excited about but aggravated too, because it would come to a point where your character would finally get evacuated out of New York City, but you'd have to stay and finish a job since you're the only one who has got the Utilities to do the job, because of your nanosuit.

Your Nanosuit is a utilitarian masterpiece with only one drawback of a low power source, which is regenerative when nothing is draining it. Otherwise, you can plan out your tactics before you run through an enemy camp, including tagging your enemies so that you know if someone is going to sneak up on you, or track where they are if you want to sneak up on them, or even get the pounce on them when you're armoured up and holding a Heavy Machine Gun which you've torn off its mount.

Personally, the majority of the game was spent Stealthed between various forms of cover, and attempting stealth kills on the majority of enemies, exceptions being the Ceph Heavies and areas I simply couldn't pass without having to kill someone. To which I used a Silenced Sniper Rifle and cracked a few headshots for mostly good results.

But this made the game tedious. While I wanted to just waltz into the fray with a light machine gun, or an assault rifle, or even the Microwave Gun you can pick up, I was tempted to lean towards sneaking up behind people and snapping their necks. There were moments where I had to run about in armour mode, but that was pretty much refined to taking out the Ceph heavies and shooting them with a Light or Heavy machine gun until they exploded.

Or the microwave gun, where they popped inside their armour. Jeez it's funny watching them do that, because the easiest way to describe the Ceph are that they're semi-transparent balloons with tentacles filled with alien bits and bobs, and armour pieces stuck over the top. It's pretty gross, but popping those suckers was just like the feeling of popping pimples in my teenhood.

Now the story has a lot of revolutions around a character called Prophet, who was pretty much a sceptical character in the first Crysis, and for good reason which is explained more and more in Crysis 2. Though in Crysis 2 you don't get to see any of the previous characters except for Prophet. Nomad and Psycho make no significant appearance which is disappointing since they were two of the main characters of C1. I hope an expansion will tell tale of their adventures, but since this is a new game I'll just wait a few months for that to happen.

In the mean time, I'll go through on a harder difficulty and see how much difference it makes to the gameplay.

Hand Held, eh?

Project Cafe is the next console in the Nintendo range and mockups of it's controller seems pretty awesome, though ugly. But with the rising generation of Touch screens coming everywhere, making the world a little more intimate with technology, it makes me wonder whether putting a touch screen into a controller is a good idea.

I do approve of the idea. Game developers everywhere will have a Blast giving the players those additional features. Cursors you'd expect to move about using your thumbstick? Use the touchpad instead. Need to assign multiple buttons to get a mid game feature? Use the touchpad. Want to minimalise the players HUD? Use the touchpad! Want to include a minigame for Player 2 to complete while player 1 does something else? Use the touchpad! Want to change songs while in the middle of a game? Use the touchpad!

And there's more where that came from, and developers will take full advantage of the fact. Just ask Sega.

However, what about the consumer? When I buy a console I get a second controller then and there, in case I want to play 2 player or if one controller runs out of battery, or it breaks. I got another controller for my PS3 when I got it, and that put me out of pocket about $75. And that's with discount. While Touchscreens are getting cheaper, the price of a controller will be phenomenal.

I will admit I'm not the most careful person in the world with my controller. I throw it about, I get my greasy pizza fingers over it, etc etc etc. I put this Touchpad controller on a similar level as a PSP, which regrettably has a massive crack in the corner of the screen. So were I to get a controller such as the suspected Project Cafe's, I'd have to take care of it like I do my Game Discs (Which I actually get a little protective of if they're left to collect dust).

Then there's the Rechargeable batteries. Wii and Xbox 360 controllers don't come with this feature, whereas PS3 do. So if you need to buy yourself rechargeable batteries, then that'll increase my budget by like $25.

So I'd wager about $200, including discounts for bulk buying with a console, just to get a preferable controller setup. Seems a bit rich to me, but Nintendo try and do something different with every console. It's an endearing fact, and I do approve of the idea. I just hope the execution works out better than on paper.

Alternative Image?

904USD and losing value each day

Shit.

Scale of the Game

I was thinking about it today. There are a large variety of games that I've looked at, and they all go from varying scales. Not just in model size, but in description of the size of game, though they do go hand in hand. But what would it be like in the minds eye to combine the lot?

Here's an example. 40k Standard at 1:60 scale, a skirmish game with Orks and Space Marines fighting over a communications array. A way down the way, an Epic 40 at 1:600 scale fights to control an area of land. A few hundred miles straight up, there's a Battlefleet Gothic game at it's own scale fighting to stop either fleets from landing more troops.

See what I mean? It's not just a skirmish, but it's one big massive battle.

Dystopian wars has a similar thing but at a wider scale rather than a focal scale. Dystopian wars covers Air, Land and Naval. It doesn't get smaller and it doesn't get into space, but it's still impressive. Though if you cross it over with Firestorm, armada and invasion, you get pretty much all varieties of table top games. Small Skirmish, Large Battle across all territories, and a space battle up above.

So what would you do with this? Personally, i'd try and figure out a way to put it into a role play game. The players would be in control of the situation. They'd have their scenario with their own characters they made, and then situation would arise that they'd have to control a series of boats down a river so they can reach a fortress they're going to defend from a contingent of tanks making their way along. then word comes you have to fly yourselves to the space port to help with the battle in orbit. Maybe give the battleship or dreadnaught some extra stats to give the players an advantage, but nothing majorly significant. Maybe like extra health, or extra weapons.

Perfect reason to do a Dystopian Role Play game. The players are a group of privates who work their way up to take full control of every situation that arrives, from performing artillery strikes to escorting a naval fleet across the sea to their new destination. Then after dealing with the situation there, they fly off to the mountains in a carrier plane and fend off enemies in fighter planes, or heavy bombers.

This is sounding cooler and cooler every moment.