Hello Top Men and Top Women! Can you believe it’s Monday again? It seems we just had one of these seven days ago!
I’ve reached the end game for Barnaby’s To Derp or Not to Derp storyline. I can reasonably guarantee that it will be completed by the end of March. I’ve got to start thinking now of some short gags so that I’ll have some material to go before launching into the next storyline. I have three storylines in mind but I haven’t decided which to go with yet.
This week will be the beginning of the Firefly flashbacks. I just finished compositing the comparisons for the first four pieces and I’m really pleased with the improvement. I still have a lot of room to grow artistically, but it’s really nice to be able to concretely see how much better I am now than I was five years ago.
New games, new games. I’ve played a number of new games this week. I’ll get the disappointment out of the way first. T.I.M.E. Stories is a really cool concept but it didn’t quite stick the landing for me. The central conceit is that the players are officers of some kind of Time Police that travel through time to fix anomalies. When you arrive in the time period, you have no idea what’s wrong. You explore to try to learn what needs to be done but you only have a certain amount of time to do so before you have to start over. The goal is to try to start over the least number of times possible. It’s scenario based and once you’ve played a scenario you’re pretty much done with it because you know all the secrets and can just go through. It’s a choose your own adventure story where you have to figure out which parts don’t advance the story so you can skip them on your next read-through. We did not succeed in our first go-through (which I think would be impossible to do) and didn’t feel engrossed enough to start over so I don’t know what the game does to ramp things up during the next attempt. We were having an off night though so I might have to give it another chance to see what else there is to it.
I received one of the games I backed on Kickstarter last week. Masmorra is a PvP dungeon crawl set in the same universe as Arcadia Quest (there are cards included with Masmorra so you can use the characters in both games). From what I’ve read, Masmorra is less mean about the PvP nature. Players explore rooms, disarm traps and defeat monsters to gain XP. In the basic game, the game ends at the end of the round where one player reaches 16+ XP. The person at the end of that round with the most XP wins. It’s by CMON Games so you know the production values are high. I backed at the higher level so I got all kinds of add-ons that add some flair and fun and enhance the replayability. I’m looking forward to playing again.
Finally, I got to try Star Wars Destiny, which is a collectible card game with specialized dice. It has received comparisons to Dice Masters which is also a collectible game with specialized dice and cards. However where Dice Masters is a dice game with cards that explain how the dice work, Destiny is a card game where the dice help fuel play. I didn’t get to play a full game as we ran out of time but I really enjoyed it.
The Royal Rumble was last night. It was a little disappointing with no exciting twists. Almost everything played out as expected and the surprises that did occur weren’t ones I thought were well-served. It’s clear that several things will have to happen for things to fit with the rumors of what Wrestlemania is building up to be. Hopefully those happenings will make the matches more enjoyable.
That’s all for this week. Have a great seven and we’ll do this all again next Monday. Carja V.