Updates 'n Such

Thanks to Lego Thursdays, I know there will be a post a week at the very least from me, however I'm used to having a post a day (or two). I have been quiet relatively speaking here and the pic above may indicate as to why.

You know my video gaming habits, I wait at least a year to play a title, that way it's a fraction the cost and there's enough reviews out there for me to make sure I'm not wasting time or money. I loved the first Assassin's Creed game though it was a bit repetitive. When the sequel came out, whoa, that took that ball and improved it by tenfold. Well I just played, devoured, and finished up the mini-sequel to Assassin's Creed II, Assassin's Creed Brotherhood.

The sequel was better than the original, this follow-up was equally better than its predecessor. This is a good game, a fully interactive Rome is at your fingertips with a framework of a clever storyline and plot twists galore. It has a great voice cast, the gameplay is spot on, and it's visually stunning. I was immersed in it and before I knew it the game was over, but it wasn't short by any means. Frankly I left a lot of the side missions by the wayside, I could keep playing this one for a while, but I had bigger fish to fry.


Red Dead Redemption has everything Assassin's Creed has, but more of it. Oh, and you're a cowboy. There are times riding around on your horse you just stop and look around at the scenery, which has been beautifully captured and rendered. It is the most open world experience you can play without the uninteresting modern world of thieving autos in a grand fashion (though both games are made by the same folks).

I picked the above pic because currently in the game I'm trying to collect some cougar skins and they keep eating me alive! Plus, that's not a rendered image, but an in-game shot. This is a hard game to talk about, if you know about the game, you've already played it. If you've already played it, you know how awesome it is. I'm a bit let down as to the time period because it's fairly modern, 1910, I would have much more preferred a pre-electricity cowboy timeline. I also think they missed an opportunity with the weapons and could have named them for the actual historical firearms that they were, not just saying "Cattleman's revolver", "repeating rifle", and the like. This of course is nitpicking an otherwise flawless game.


It's not all videogames however. As you know we play a monthly Deathwatch game, it just started up actually. But we also game on a weekly basis with a slightly different group of players and mostly it's miniatures or boardgames. Every now and then the pendulum swings to roleplaying games however.

We're going to play a fantasy RPG using one of my favorite set of rules, the FATE system. Something we've done a lot with in the past. Within this framework we're going to use the Warhammer world as the setting.

This is a fairly old and well established setting, it's been around longer than you think. We're going to play something similar to 40k Dark Heresy agents, set within the human-centric Empire. As you can see from the borrowed pic on the left, I'll be playing a Halfling "entrepreneur" roguish type.

Thanks to the character creation session we had last night, I've got a lot of great hooks and background tidbits to work with. That's the good thing about FATE, everyone plays off of the input and idea of the group.

Well, that's about it for a quick update. I didn't even mention the new Blood Bowl team I've started playing!