Before I start the review, I would like to send out a special thanks to Cam Banks for yet another gem of a book.
So, you have the core book for Supernatural and are looking for a adventure to run. First, Jamie Chambers who wrote the core book hid an Easter egg adventure in the pictures at the beginning of each chapter. Really cool, you have to piece together the clippings for the adventure. Go try it.
Okay, down to brass tacks. The hardest thing to do is run a game that gives players a feel that they can roam around as they want. You, as the GM, must try to avoid that linear feeling. Guess what? The writers of these adventures did a excellent job of creating the perfect feel. While reading The Red Ghost, I was impressed that the players could wander around the site and investigate different areas in any order. I don’t want to reveal too many secrets, so let’s leave it at that; it is a ghost story.
I would like to point out that the Cortex system makes things incredibly easy to run each adventure. All of the tasks set forth have the difficulty already set in each scene. This lets the game flow easily from scene to scene.
You have five great adventures to choose from: The Red Ghost, Transmutation, Hell Hound on my Trail, His Lesser Half, and Synchronicity. All can be dropped-in at a moments notice. Any one can easily teach you how to create your own campaigns by following it like a blueprint.
All in all an excellent book well worth the price of admission.
Being a huge fan of the show, I have waited a long time for the role playing game core book to be released. Was it worth the wait? Indeed. Let’s have a look.
Alright, collaborate and listen to me talk about Champions Online. My brother and I got into the beta but that wasn’t the end of it. Remember how you were all happy when Mount Doom exploded at the end of Return of the King and then you were all like ‘wait…what happened to Mister Frodo and Sam?’. That’s kinda how the beta was. I pre-ordered the game, got the key and everything, downloaded the client, and everything was free and clear! Then I had to patch the game and let me tell you, I’d rather be shot in the leg than go through that again. I won’t delve into the innumerable amounts of problems the patcher had but it mostly consisted of a folder mix-up leading to a 3.6 GB download just for the patch and a constantly failing patch server leading to disconnect after disconnect. So let me lay it down for you, really long day of intermittent success that ended at 3 in the morning with an up and ready game to play. But, by that time I didn’t feel like playing.
Then tomorrow came. I woke up at the crack of noon and rolled out of bed to play Champions. It was all fun, the best part of course being character creation. There are tons of costume pieces, maybe even more than City of Heroes (Cryptic’s last venture into super hero MMOs) and you don’t have to wait 20 levels to get a cape! But I didn’t make a cape guy despite my elation, I made a bad ass robot who shoots equally bad ass bolts of energy and has a shoulder-mounted mini-gun. He’s that big billy bad ass at the top of the post. So I did a run through of the opening scenario and the desert zone that follows. I picked up the jet boots flight power, which is cool if you don’t mind the bad maneuverability. Then I made some triflin’ witch doctor bastard with a skull head.
I gave him a mix of the magic and supernatural power sets which turned out really good and thematic. I picked up earth flight with him, its pretty self explanatory. You fly around on a hunk of whatever you were standing on at the time, you do it in the city you’ll get a rebar-filled concrete chunk, and if you’re in Canada you’ll fly on a snowy chunk of stone. And then, as I told my friends I would, I made Broly.
You might not know him, so if you don’t I’ll just throw this explanation at you: 350 lbs. of shit your pants flying at Mach 4 shooting energy balls that destroy planets. Surprisingly, it worked out well. They had all the pieces necessary to make him and if they didn’t I found something real close to it. The ability to customize the color of your powers (and where they shoot from, for some) make making original guys a possibility.
The only problem I found through all my character creating adventures (minus the expected beta bugs) was taste-based. I’m not a Silver Age comics guy, I’m more of an Ultimates guy, where Hulk gets to eat people. So, obviously, I was a bit disappointed when I walked through fields of campy dialogue, enemies, and villains. It’s made bearable by the bad ass game play but if you like Silver Age stuff. you’ll love this game. In my honest opinion, I like the cast of villains and heroes for City of Heroes/Villains better.
The game comes out September 1st, pre-order customers get a head start (myself) and you should buy it if you like comics or superheroes in general. This game gets my GOOD stamp.
I will preface this with the fact that if it has anything at all to do with Warhammer 40,000 I will buy, play, or maybe kill a man to get it depending on how cool it is. So keep in mind that if something has Warhammer and/or 40,000 in its title I will do my best to enjoy it.
Word may or may have not reached your ears about the long awaited Warhammer 40,000 MMO. If it has, you’ll probably be waiting for it even longer than you have due to its slated release date (2011). If it hasn’t, then I’ll freshen up your memory.
First, I’ll start with its history, dating all the way back to 1994. Blizzard, the company I now call Faggard, wanted to make Warhammer Fantasy into a strategy game. Keep in mind this was back when Blizzard was in its golden age, bringing you such titles as Starcraft, Diablo, and Warcraft, not when it became the company that created World of Warcraft and labored to create Starcraft: Ghost or whatever the fuck it was called, thank god that failed. Now, Games Workshop, being the elitist Brits that they are, refused to allow an American company to get a hold of their rights to make a computer game out of their precious miniature war games. Blizzard had already made considerable progress on the game before showing it to execs at GW, so it was like when your High School teacher threw out your paper because it was too “offensive” (I speak from experience). So what Blizzard did was take their ball and go home with a sad face on, then it occurred to make WARcraft instead of WARhammer. And it never dawned on GW that their IP was getting raped? Nope. After making millions of dollars off of their Warcraft franchise, Blizzard turned towards GW once again and stole Warhammer 40,000, mutated it into Starcraft, and made even more cash. You can draw the lines for both games if you don’t believe me, 40k (Space Marines-Space Marines, Tyranids-Zerg, Old Ones-Xel’Naga), Fantasy (Orks-Orcs, Empire-Humans, Dark Elves-Undead, Elves-Night and High Elves, Chaos-Burning Legion). They even have the same fucking back-story! Horus (Arthas) betrays his King (Emperor) who is also his father, go figure, after listening to a demon-lich king-thing trapped inside a sword (Chaos Gods). I’m sure Diablo came from somewhere too, but I can’t put a name to it so I’ll give Blizzard credit for it at least. There you have it, so dark the con of Blizzard.
Alright, now that that is over with we can get on to the important stuff. GW waited a hefty 10 years or so to majorly break into the video game market with their release of Dawn of War. Yes, they had some titles here and there before that but none of them were all that great/important, one of them even had a Tau for the main character. Of course, Dawn of War became massively popular and was hailed as the dawn of a new age in RTS (real-time strategy) games. This led to three expansion packs and a sequal for Dawn of War, a PSP game revolving around turn-based tactics, and a 3rd-person God of War-esque Action game called Space Marine with a TBA release date, but even more than that was that it also drew attention to everything with the word Warhammer in its title. Warhammer Fantasy got an MMO (Age of Reckoning) and a Total War-esque game (Mark of Chaos). If you have been keeping up with the news, EA bought Mythic (who makes Age of Reckoning) and Bioware (who is making the new Star Wars MMO) and I have no doubt in my mind they have their eyes fixed on THQ next (who publishes the 40k stuff). Blizzard and Activision merged to create Blactivision (haha right?) and they’re owned by Vivendi Universal (another monolithic company that owns a different side of the universe). So, in a sense, a line is being drawn in the sand in the game market between EA and Blactivision (who also makes the super-popular Call of Duty games, among others). Eventually they’re going to duke out in a Witch King-Gandalf fight but right now they’re just mustering forces.
Which is where the Warhammer 40,000 MMO comes into play and why it might piss me off. “It has been made clear that although the game will feature relatively in-depth fire-fights with player-formed squads as well as cover and flanking mechanics it is definitely a MMORPG as opposed to a MMOFPS.” That’s word and verse from some marketing exec or whatever when he was being interviewed about the game. I’m sorry, did you just say running around and shooting, which is an FPS, will not be present in a game based around a setting/mini game in which running around and shooting is a core component? Well, shit, if that’s how we’re doing it nowadays… Yeah, they said flanking and cover and whatnot will be present but let’s be honest here, how many promises made in development are kept through to release? Everyone has a pretty bad track record for that. In addition to that it gets even worse, they’re not even sure they’re going to have vehicles in a game, now wrap your mind around this, based around fucking vehicles! Dreadnoughts, Predator tanks, fuckin’ Baneblades, Fire Prisms, I could go on for pages with vehicles that are used in the mini-game, and they have no idea which ones, if any, will be in it. Alright, I know by now you’re thinking, “This guy is either crazy or retarded, maybe both, I don’t know. It’s 40k! How can it be that bad?” They’re some small kernels of hope here, I will say that. You’re characters will be extremely customizeable (like in the Warhammer Fantasy MMO, which worked there very well) and they are “absolutely no non-combat classes, as that would not make sense with the setting”. Finally a company that cares about making sense. Why would you have a plain-old-healer in a game where even the healer (Apocethary) cuts people in half with a chainsaw-sword? You wouldn’t and that’s why there isn’t one. This is good stuff along with the proposed ability to visit a massive range of different areas, which include abandoned Space Hulks, chaos shrines, deserted battlefields, etc., more good stuff, eh?
I’ll say it myself, I could be totally wrong about this and the game might make you involuntarily ejaculate in your pants when you load it up for the first time. But if they wanted to make it awesome, they would take Planetside, strip away everything about the Planetside setting and apply the Warhammer 40,000 template to it.
For now though, since you have no 40k MMO to play, I will leave you with this:
