My New Year’s resolutions involve playing more games and watching more TV. Yes, I know. Most people resolve to better themselves in some way or be more productive, not slack more. Not me!
Tabletop Games:
My first play of Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords was in less than ideal conditions – it was in a dim, crowded room at someone’s house. Everyone at the table was new to the game and the person teaching the game was essentially just reading the rules aloud. We fumbled through it and I didn’t really get a good sense of the game. I definitely was not impressed. However, I continued to be brainwashed by the hype and obtained a copy in a math trade. Three plays in and I LOVE it. I’m the elf rogue and MOH (My Other Half) is the dwarf ranger. We’ve beaten the first three adventures but only by cooperating and taking advantage of our individual talents. In the last scenario, we just plain got lucky by encountering the minions early and holding blessings in our hands at the time to boost our rolls. This scenario requires intelligence and charisma and alas, we are both dumb and ugly. But we did it, woohoo, and I can hardly wait to play it again, a feeling that I don’t get very often with new games these days. If the new adventure packs provide enough variety, this game is going to be an awesome substitute for an RPG. You get to level up, gradually replace old gear with new, better gear and you feel like you are a part of a story. Good stuff.
On The Pad:
Not much this past week as I had jury duty and hence not commuting to work on the train where most of my iPad gaming takes place. I did download a wildly popular game called Empire a while back when it was on sale and started fooling with it a bit. It looks interesting but I’m highly annoyed that it doesn’t support landscape mode. I’m not a programmer, but shouldn’t that be a pretty easy feature to add?
On the PC:
OMG, Hearthstone. HEARTHSTONE. I downloaded this thing yesterday and I am HOOKED. I never got into M:tG other than collecting the pretty cards back in the 90s, but this simplified sibling from Blizzard has me thinking about it constantly. I’m getting my butt kicked for the most part against human players, but I’m still in the early stages of figuring out how to build a decent deck. I’m mostly fooling around with the mage (those breasts – good grief!) they start you on, but I probably won’t stick with her as my main class. I like warriors and rogues. If you haven’t checked this out yet, DO IT NOW. It’s free to play. They need to get this to iOS ASAP so I can play it a lot more. Like, during this one-sided Super Bowl game I’ve been watching.
On the Telly:
I’ve been watching Freaks and Geeks and am devastated to find out that there was only one season. I only have the last episode to watch <sob>. It has a great cast of stars before they were stars and it nails 1980 high school perfectly. I should know – I was there. I was more of a Geek than a Freak, but I so would have had a crush on bad boy Daniel (James Franco).
The Super Bowl was so lopsided that I bailed to go watch Downton Abbey. I like both teams so I didn’t care who won; I just wanted a decent game. Oh, well.