Apparently, I don’t look at my blog while on vacation, heh. A belated Happy New Year to everyone. We had a good time, with our friend Marty visiting for his birthday, chili fest part two, and gaming. We actually played a $5 game of hold-em with five people, which was really fun since we haven’t played in two years (or longer?).
Out with the old, in with the new!
There’s a petition up to add a color-blind option to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which is an awesome game. For those not familiar with it, it uses red and green name tags (and icons) when playing multiplayer matches online: red for enemies and green for friendlies. Needless to say, this can pose a problem for players with red/green colorblindness.
I was actually very surprised when I didn’t find a color-blind option in MW2, when CoD: World at War had such an option. In WaW, it made the name tags blue/red, or maybe it was orange? Whatever it was, they were very distinctive colors, heh. I understand the developers are different (Infinity Ward did the two Modern Warfare CoD games while Treyarch has done the WW2 CoD games), but c’mon, color-blind options should be as commonplace in games as Y-axis inversion (which is to say, ubiquitous — don’t get me started on games that don’t include inversion options).
An estimated 8-10% of the male population has some form of color-blindness, and red/green is the most common. I’ve seen on the MW2 leaderboards that there are already over 5 million people ranked online. This means that over 400,000 gamers (read: customers) are potentially negatively affected by this issue.
If you want more thoughts on color-blindness, feel free to read my previous post about it: Color Me Blind. Otherwise, please hit this petition and help us out. Thanks!
EDIT: some less generous members of the community have made the observation that it may require some cost to implement color-blind options, and that cost is then borne by the rest of the community; ten percent is a minority, after all. My response to this is (a) 10% is still quite significant — what business wouldn’t say yes to a 10% boost in sales, for example? and (b) what really bugs me is that the red/green palette was chosen in the first place. This is, frankly, an antiquate color scheme. Red/green traffic lights. Red/green status lights and LEDs. Is it simply because blue LEDs are more expensive to manufacture? Or just laziness and lack of forward thinking on the part of manufacturers?
The bottom line: why do game developers continue to choose red/green colors at all? Why couldn’t this (and many other games) use red/blue or blue/green right from the start, for everyone? The only place I would expect to use red/green is in games that require many colors; I even use them myself sometimes in my boardgame designs. In these cases, though, I take care to vary the brightness of the colors so that is an additional cue, and of course the use of symbols/shapes can be used as an alternate cue. The XBLA game “Hexic” adds icons to the pieces when the color-blind option is enabled; Bejeweled uses different shaped gems. It’s not rocket science, people.
I rested up a little after this year’s con and now my memories of the sequence of events is already fading, heh.
Dad flew directly to Dallas this year and Steve was reffing some D1 volleyball at Ole Miss this year, so it was just Brian, John and I driving down. We arrived about 12:15 and, like last year, I checked in first and got a room while Brian and John had to wait, so we just went directly to the con registration afterwards. Queen Games was a big sponsor this year, offering one of three games for each attendee, based on a ticket draw. Luckily, we each got a different one, so that was nice in terms of the group collection (I got a 2p game called Aton). There was also a secondary drawing in which I got a pick off a prize rack — there wasn’t much left, so I chose a 3-volume hardcover bundle of World of Darkness RPG supplements for grins. I think John and Brian each got extra yellow tickets for the Thought Hammer drawings.
Dad called from the airport about then, so we decided to dink around the vendors while waiting for him. Thought Hammer was actually selling this year for the first time and the crowd there was substantial. We would learn later that it was because their checkout process was quite slow. They basically had a laptop set up and were processing transactions through their own website. Makes sense, I suppose, since they are an online retailer only, but it was sure slow. They also didn’t have prices on their products (they were offering their standard web prices), which I understand was partially due to having a lot of their stuff shipped directly to the con, trying to get last minute items like Essen games there in time for the con. Anyway, I hope they have some good lessons learned if they sell again next year, such as having a cash-only line and possibly multiple POS laptops. I had a gift certificate to them from the guys for my birthday, but decided to hold off on buying anything just yet from them. (I later ended up buying God’s Playground by Martin Wallace, and a 2p game I hope to get D to try called Day & Night.)
Instead, we wandered over to the ZMan area and I spotted a game called Shazamm! that was on my wishlist, for only $10 (I think — I’m already getting fuzzy on the prices). I couldn’t even remember what the game was about, but it was on my spreadsheet as a “3″ (Like to Have), so I grabbed it and Campaign Manger 2008, the latest from Jason Matthews and Christian Leonhard, for $30 (I think). The guy was up-selling me by offering a ZMan tote bag with a $50 purchase, so I talked Brian into buying Saboteur for $10, heh.
Dad arrived and he got through registration. He also got Aton from Queen and a pick off the rack. I suggested Cluzzle to him, since it is sort of party-game-ish and might be something they could play with friends back home. He hadn’t eaten yet, so we ran over to Denny’s for lunch, before returning and checking out The Adventurers from the game library. Speaking of which, the library had a major upgrade in efficiency this year. Gone were the tables piled with games and the manual library card checkout system. The games were now in wire racks, grouped alphabetically by title, and barcoded for near-instant checkout. A++ to the new system.
The Adventurers was pretty fun. I’m not going to regurgitate my impressions of all the games, necessarily — I’ve already covered them in an after-con geeklist. We tried another AEG game next, Arcana, which was something of a disappointment to us. It wasn’t bad, per se, but it didn’t do anything for us. More games for Thursday include a horse-racing game called Long Shot (great with 5+ players), a worker placement game with some extra Western chrome called Carson City, and one of the games I brought with me, Dad’s copy of Pacific Typhoon. We played that during an event that got us prize tickets for GMT games, and Dad actually won a major game – Combat Commander: Pacific, which I hope we get to play during Christmas when they visit.
Everyone else went to bed after the midnight prize drawings, but I let Rodney talk me into staying up till 2am playing that Carson City game, so I was a little tired Friday morning. Friday’s games included: Ivanhoe (wouldn’t mind getting this), Jamaica (another good game, and probably a good gateway game — Brian got a copy from his Secret Santa), Dungeon Lords (solid Euro game, Bman bought a copy), Triumvirate (great 2p trick-taking game, I bought a copy off the designer), Summoner Wars (CCG elements mixed with tactical miniatures play = fun), Crokinole, Witch of Salem (Arkham Horror lite), Nottingham (from the designer of Bohnanza), and of course, our annual game of Struggle of Empires. Astoundingly, Bman won this for the third straight time; he should probably retire from SoE competition at this point, lol. We were up till 3am finishing this thing, too, which was brutal.
Saturday was a little slower. People slept in a little more, plus there were distractions like completing the Math Trade. There was more Ivanhoe (and on Sunday morning, too), Jamaica, Long Shot and Dungeon Lords. Brian and Bman played Battlestar Galactica twice with the Pegasus expansion and had a lot of (intense) fun with it. I got to try out one of my wishlist trade games, In the Shadow of the Emperor, which I liked quite a bit (winning is always nice, too). I showed To Court the King to Brian and Rodney, which I also got in trade after playing it with Dad a couple years ago.
Speaking of which, I was mega-happy with my Math Trade results this year. To avoid getting too many of one game type like I have previously — like light games and gateways, for example — I built my want list by using duplication protection on whole classes of games. This means I only got 1 light game, 1 wargame, 1 “like to have” game, 1 abstract, plus several of my more desirable games.
Brian and I also played Martin Wallace’s Waterloo, which we had planned ahead of time to do during the con. I was the Allies and lost horribly, even faster than in our first/previous game. I think the Allies really need to be defensive until the Prussians arrive at 3pm, but that doesn’t sound historical? I’m not sure, I’m not a Napoleonics guy.
The drawings on Saturday were at 7pm, along with announcing the Golden Geek Award winners, so I don’t think we stayed up all that late that night. We took it easy Sunday with Ivanhoe and then, after Dad headed for the airport, wrapped up with a game of Infinite City that I bought from the AEG booth. We called it a con and headed for home, stopping at Snuffers to try what Brian claimed was the best cheese fries evar. Well, it was damned good, maybe the best I’ve had — better than Eskimo Joe’s and maybe even The Brook’s.
All in all, another great experience. I wish Rodney had gotten in on our annual SoE, and I didn’t get to play a single game with Matt after he arrived late Friday, but there was plenty of gaming to be had, so all’s good. They are adding a day to the event next year, starting on a Wednesday instead of Thursday — D isn’t too keen on that, haha. We’ll see how that goes.
Phew! Man, got back last night around dinner time and still tired despite taking today off. I’ll probably put up a geeklist on BGG about all the games we played, and then follow it up with a few more musings here afterward. Meanwhile, I have TV and Xbox to catch up on once family time returns to normal.
People spoof RPG conceits all the time, but this one was really funny, I thought. It is a loan rejection letter to an adventure shopkeeper, written by Matthew Baldwin (aka Defective Yeti), posted over on the Morning News.
There is some funny shite in there, give it a read.
I apologize for the generic post, which this is, as I feel like my blogging has been neglected a lot lately. So, here is a random post of bits on today’s topic: things that are quick.
I have no idea how I came across this, but here is a shoelace tying technique called the Ian Knot. You can hit the creator’s website for directions (and other stuff), but here is a video I found illustrating it.
Here is a Radical SR8 setting a speed record at Nurburgring in Germany — “widely considered the toughest, most dangerous and most demanding purpose-built race track in the world,” says Wikipedia. It’s my favorite track in racing games like Forza Motorsport and Project Gotham Racing. It’s funny, I recognize the turns from driving on it so much in those games.
Haha, I was looking for more things that were fast and came across this video, “World’s Fastest Everything.”
Heh, me and Bman have been resurrecting our (mostly old) CCGs, starting with Magic and Game of Thrones. I decided to get a few thumbs and entertainment out of it by writing session reports on each new (old) CCG, and then linking them up with an ongoing geeklist over on BGG. So, if you are so inclined, you can keep up with…
Not that I follow it, but I do run a fantasy league over in the Fantasy Premier League, heh. I didn’t do as well this year, as my Preston Lakes FC finished 12th out of 21 teams in the BGG Premiership. Daniel Booth took first, as he did last year, winning the pot of 60 geek gold.
I did a bit better in the head-to-head league, a new feature this year, where I finished in 5th place.
Better luck next year!
Something that’s been bugging me more and more lately, and I don’t know why it started, is the obession with pirates. I mean, I like a pirate themed game as much as the next guy, but it’s really starting to bug me how much pirates are marketed to kids. Pirates, especially those from the “Golden Age” as popularized in movies like Pirates of the Caribbean and in kids television shows as innocent as Backyardigans, WordWorld and even VeggieTales, were generally sadistic, murderous criminals.
More and more when I see these things, or children’s Halloween costumes, I can’t help but wonder why we glorify piracy. Such diverse boardgames as Pirate’s Cove (from family-oriented publisher Days of Wonder) and Blackbeard (a classic Avalon Hill title by esteemed designer Richard Berg, recently republished by GMT) remain fairly popular, and even I have a design idea or two with piratical themes. I bought some black stones with the Jolly Roger on them at a local store called Primarily Kids, just because they look cool and I want to use them in a game.
Some reading on Wikipedia reveals that the Jolly Roger has slowly been divorced from its purely piratical usage and into something more abstract. For example, during WW2 it was used by British and Australian submarines “as an indicator of bravado and stealth rather than of lawlessness.” It was (and is) used on military aircraft, and various insignia. I suppose something similar has happened in the greater culture, where playing pirates is as innocent as “cops and robbers” and “cowboys and Indians.”
Of course, I’m not especially enamored of Ryan one day learning how to play at those games, either. I think I prefer him sticking to Kung Fu Panda or Transformers, something with a little less overtly criminal history or human-on-human violence, haha.
I subscribe to quite a few blogs in my Google Reader. I don’t always keep up with them all, especially the last few months after Caroline came home and my free time took a big hit. This morning, it occurred to me that I never write anything like real game analysis or strategy for a game. For example, Seth Owen’s blog Pawnderings tends to have a lot of wargame analysis, and a recent series on My Play has focused on Race for the Galaxy strategy.
I got to thinking about why I don’t write articles like that. I’m a strategic kinda guy. I like writing. I love gaming. So what gives? I think it’s because I don’t feel like I’ve mastered any particular game sufficiently to feel comfortable writing a strategy article about it, and for those games I do have a lot of plays on, they are already well-known and well-discussed already (Puerto Rico and Dominion, for example).
I think it is a direct result of my apparently insatiable appetite for new games. Sure, I enjoy playing games multiple times, but the low frequency of gaming I “enjoy” these days coupled with the large number of distinct games owned by me, my friends and gaming group, means repeat plays are few and far between. I even acknowledge this in the geekbadge on my BGG profile: Game Tourist.
I also tend to avoid reading strategy articles myself. A big part of the fun in gaming is “discovering” different strategies, and I’m especially known for trying things that are off the beaten path. If I don’t read strategy much, why would I write it?