FBTB

Category: Board Games

  • 2023 In Review: Nick’s Top Video Games, Media, Tabletop, and Even LEGO

    2023 In Review: Nick’s Top Video Games, Media, Tabletop, and Even LEGO

    No, that year is not a typo.

    So… I wrote this whole thing about a year ago and never got around to posting it. Here we are, at the end of 2024 and I’m working on my current year and so little feels like it hasn’t changed. So my 2024 review makes sense, I’m going to just post this and go from there. Below is the unedited post that I’d more or less wrapped up back in February. Look for this year’s “year in review stuff” soon, likely on New Year’s Eve. But who knows. I’m scheduling this to post at the start of December and a lot can go seriously wrong between now and then.

    Also, it’s just sad how much of this is the same, except worse.

    2023 can * bleep * right off. I don’t think that’s honestly a controversial opinion. Sure, 2020 gave us a Pandemic, and 2021 gave us it’s terrible sequel year. 2022 was the year where things looked like they were improving a little bit, but not really, while 2023 is where everything started to come apart at the seems. Not sure about you, but it’s the year where all the inflation caused by unchecked corporate greed, legislative inaction, and decades of tax breaks that benefit the .01% have made everything vastly more expensive than it has to be.

    Not gonna lie, this last year was absolutely brutal for me. I have scaled back my posting over the years just because… you know, life and what not, but this year there are a few more things pushing that. (Not at all) fun fact… I learned this year that long-term general anxiety can develop into full-on depression. You can probably guess how I learned that. So here we are, in mid-February, and I’m finally getting around to writing about last year.

    There’s a whole bunch of talk of “the economy” being good, except that honestly doesn’t feel true for the middle class (where I’m firmly seated). Where I live in Texas, houses went from “scrimp and save” to “you’re never gonna get one of these.” Groceries bills have more or less doubled, because that’s a spot where inflation has hit the hardest. So many companies that I like(d) or have purchased from have gone from “companies are not your friend” to “actively trying to destroy the world.” Oh, and obviously… Texas.

    So a lot of 2023 was spent treading water and spinning plates, desperately trying to keep them up… and by the end of the year, I’d mostly failed at that in the end. I won’t dump a whole lot here, that’s for when I talk to my therapist (seriously, y’all, therapy can help – it’s not a cure, but it helps)… more just saying why this list is what it is. There were also fun things like the vicious cycle of weight loss and gaining a lot of it back, some skin cancer and surgery to remove it (thankfully all gone), money troubles because of unexpected expenses, and working in technology when unchecked greed and corporations start laying of thousands for fun.

    It wasn’t all bad things, though, there were some legit fun things. I did more stuff this year in my core hobbies, and even may have purchased a toy or two for myself. Or one very expensive toy that 3D prints toys.

    LEGO Sets

    Wait, what? Since when do I get LEGO sets? True fact, I have a bunch of sets around that I need to take pictures of for reviews. Most didn’t come out this year, and my paralysis at getting things done has made some of them kind of pointless, since the sets are no longer available.

    LEGO Icons Atari 2600

    This is one of those reviews that I need to get done, because this might have become one of my favorite sets of all time now*. Which… is honestly saying something. The Atari has a weird place in my life… I never had one, but had a cousin that did. I was supposed to get one for a Christmas back in the early 80s, but my dick of a father decided to return it after I found the poorly hidden gift since it was “no longer a surprise.” Which, you know, is just a great thing to do to a five year old. Funny what memories you can remember despite it being several decades ago. Can’t remember what I did six months ago, can remember that as one of my earliest memories.

    While the Nintendo was a more formative part of my childhood, the Atari is what defined it early. I remember that ugly 2600 box and being blow away by the massive pixels of the machine and playing games with my cousin.

    More than that, though, as a LEGO set, this was simply a joy to build in a way that the Nintendo Entertainment System just… wasn’t. I still need to get the review done, but there’s so much to this set, so many little wonderful things, that are just fantastic. While I rated the NES highly, and love the set… the biggest knock on it was that it was more about the engineering than getting the little bits and touches. Fixed buttons, a cartridge insert that barely worked, and one Easter Egg that you wouldn’t ever see unless you knew it was there.

    This set, by contrast, is just dripping with those little touches and Easter Eggs. This set is designed as a celebration of the the set, rather than an engineering marvel of being able to turn a screen. There’s still some of that, with “working” switches and power buttons, but first and foremost, it’s about just being a beautiful celebration of when Atari wasn’t a shell of a company that just hawked its brand.

    This is a review i need to finish before the set gets retired, but since Icons stuff seems to hang around a lot longer than normal sets, it’ll likely stick around for some time.

    *For the record, I’d say my top five sets of all time are (in no particular order):

    Of course, if I had to build this list a week from now, it’d probably be full of different things. But those are sets that I have that get rebuilt and displayed occasionally, and I won’t ever get rid of.

    The Worst of LEGO

    It was very much a mixed bag for me in this little dabbling of LEGO, because honestly, most of them were just… not all that great? Either the set or the experience, or both. Most Star Wars and Marvel sets feel like “let’s throw this together and hit a price point” rather than builds that feel thought out and loved. The ones that are, like things in the UCS line, command prices that are just absurd and I wish no one would purchase at this point. The price escalation of LEGO overall should have killed it three or four times over, but they’ve strangled out so many other things, or hidden in a marketplace where people (i.e. adult nerds) have just started to accept forever escalating prices with less and less value.

    Marvel Collectable Minifigures Series 2

    This is another article that I never finished, but if you’re on our Discord, you know why I have a particular grudge against the CMF lines at this point. I stopped collecting them years ago, before i dropped other LEGO sets, mostly because the system was just… gross. It’s gatcha products, and they tie up too many interesting things

    Okay, so, I had a whole article that I never got around to finishing, about how bad my experience was. Spoiler for that article… but I bought 20 figures at a Target around me and got… four different minifigs in them. One of them was unique, the rest were repeats of just three figures. Clearly, it had been picked over or something like that, but they had just been put out on the cashwrap area when I got them.

    When these came out, there was a whole stream of articles for people who were buying up small portable scales to go and weigh the different boxes to figure out what’s inside, and clearly, I got the end result of that. I’ll go into this more in the article, but let me say this… if you’re an AFOL (or more likely a scalper) who does something like this – f*** you. Just, f*** you. You and the other “bag fondlers” that go through an entire store selection to strip out figures and leave the leftovers are a blight, and you’re no better than the people who buy up every set to sell on the aftermarket or parting them out so no one else can get them. In fact, people who go and strip out the minifigs are probably worse.

    I’m and adult and was buying these for myself, but I can easily imagine a parent getting a few figures for their kid while checking out. When said kid opens three of them and gets the same figure, likely someone they don’t even know… that kid’s day is kind of ruined and they’re never going to get another figure like this again. If I bought these for my kids and saw this, there’d be an outright “no, those things are a ripoff” line ready every time I saw a LEGO polybag.

    That there were honest discussions about bringing a scale and measuring these to find out what was inside, and that so few stepped back and asked themselves “wait a sec” is an indictment of that whole flavor of AFOL and the product in general.

    For my part, I completed my set after collaborating with someone in our Discord to get the ones I was missing after another trip to a different Target with fairly similar results. But those were the last CMF figures I will ever buy.

    Movies and Streaming

    Unlike last year, where I didn’t actually watch any new movies… I watched at three four* new movies this year. Okay, so, movies still aren’t really by thing to me anymore… most of my time is spent rewatching the old things I’ve always liked or just watching streaming shows or YouTube.

    *I forgot that I also saw Spider-Verse, but how about I don’t go into the fact that it was 90% awesome and 10% worst thing I watched all year.

    Super Mario Bros. 

    This was always going to be a movie that my family was going to see. My son loves Mario, and has loved him for a few years – though his favorite character from the series is Princess Peach, and his favorite Hot Wheel Mario Kart is Bowser. He was dressed as Mario for Halloween back in 2022 (he went as a Pokemon trainer this year)… owns a Cappy, and asked for a Mario-themed birthday party. So yeah, we were always going to watch it.

    It was surprisingly enjoyable… not saying that it’s going to win an Oscar or any real awards unless the Kid’s Choice Awards are still a thing (or a Grammy, cause, you know, Peaches).

    Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

    This is the first of three times that D&D is going to show up on this list, so I’ll save the “oh my god, Hasbro, you suck” for a later section. But as a thing, D&D was a sandwich wrapped in a layer of thin crap, with a terrible start and a terrible end to the year with some wonderful things in the middle.

    The D&D movie, Honor Among Thieves, was one of those things that should have just been awful. D&D as a whole hasn’t exactly translated well to… anything other than video games, really. The last D&D movie was… just god awful, and followed up on a cartoon from the 80s that’s remembered fondly for just how terrible it was. So when a new one was announced, everything was stacked against it.

    At the same time, though, there were some actual big names tied to the movie. Chris Pine was set to star, along with plenty of other big names. It also didn’t look like it was going to be a straight-up lowest effort movie, with actual effects and an existing setting. Honestly, a lot of this has been driven by stuff like Critical Role being genuinely good and loved, and D&D having gone firmly mainstream compared to the other efforts. Still, like most video game movies, the chances of this being awful were high.

    So when I watched it in the theater, and not only was it fun and entertaining, it could be called legitimately a good movie. It’s not going to win any awards, and it was full of all the tropes and so many things that are just inside jokes and fan service… but it still was just fun. They managed to create a movie stuffed to the brim with those things, yet could be watched by anyone and still be fun. The story only was enriched by knowing all the jokes, but not required. Unlike anything Marvel does, you didn’t have to do homework in order to watch the film.

    Barbie

    I’m too “old man” at this point to have cared even a little bit about the whole Barbieheimer or whatever happened this summer… so I saw this when it came out on Max a few weeks ago. I knew I’d like it, and I did. It certainly had a message, one I was perfectly fine with, and it was funny as well. Not perfect, but still pretty great.

    The Not So Good

    Obviously, I’m not the person to ask about the latest movies coming out. When I can count the number of movies I’ve watched – not just went to in the theater (though that number was two), but new movies in general. Most of that is driven by the fact that I’m just… over a lot of stuff. I’m not going to put Ahsoka on this list, because I’m not really tired of Star Wars, per se, I just don’t feel the need to immediately watch anything that’s not named Andor.

    All things Marvel and DC

    What I am tired of is basically everything Marvel and Disney are doing in that space right now. I haven’t watched anything this year, and don’t really plan to. The last thing I watched through and enjoyed was Hawkeye… so that’s two years or so where I just gave Marvel a complete pass. They aren’t helped by the fact they waited until the very last minute to drop a known abuser, waiting for an official court verdict, because obviously that’s the thing that a private company needs to do.

    Beyond that, though… it’s just honestly not interesting. The last thing I watched and loved was Peacemaker, something I’ve rewatched a couple of times. Gunn, now lording over the DCU and killing the things that are interesting (Henry Cavill clearly needs a hug after losing Superman, and I enthusiastically volunteer to be the one to give it to him; don’t feel bad though, he’s got 40k now) but needed help.

    Comic movies, as a genre, are basically gone. The next and likely only thing I’ll watch will be Deadpool 3, mostly because my wife and I will go and watch it together. Oh, I guess I did watch Spider-Verse, I was supremely disappointed in the ending and the fact that the movie didn’t bother to wrap things up before just… ending. It pissed me off then, and pisses me off now. That turned a movie that was a 10/10 into a firm 5/10, because it undermined the whole movie.

    Revivals of Old Things

    I never watched Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull… Last Crusade was a wonderful way to end the story and it always felt “done.” So when another movie in the series was announced, I wasn’t enthused. In fact, I’m still not, and haven’t watched it.

    If the previous decade was all about reboots, the current era seems to be much more about “restarts.” Shows that had been off the air for a decade or more were getting additional, often terrible, seasons. Frasier wasn’t ever my favorite show, but oh my god, the new one is so terrible that it’s just replacements of the old characters with new ones. I made it through one episode before I just noped out and wouldn’t watch it.

    Same with “That 90s Show,” which was a new season of “That 70s Show,” something I did like… and oh my god is was as bad as Frasier. I couldn’t finish the second episode, because it was about as funny as anything Aston Kutcher has done outside of the original show. The Futurama “uncancelled again” season was hit-or-miss, with the real highlights coming towards the end and some real awful things in the middle.

    Nostalgia is already a dangerous thing to play with, and it seems to be the only idea going for a lot of things out there. Which is odd in a year where we got the best adaptation of a video game ever, and other new shows that are legitimately funnier than just revisiting the old things.

    Video Games

    I’ve probably played more video games this year than I have in more recent years on record. This was bolstered, in part, by the fact that my daughter, officially a preteen now (which, WTF, time, stop it), has also gotten into games in a big, big, way. She’s also too smart for her own good and snarky, so, she takes after me in a lot of ways – though she’s probably smarter. Not all of them, though, I can’t get her to watch Star Wars or Star Trek.

    Vampire Survivors

    This was my game at the end of last year, when it came out, and dominated the start, middle, and end of my year as the new DLC came out. I’m not a huge fan of roguelike’s, and yet… this game just does all the things for me.

    There were multiple patches and DLCs put out in 2023, including a surprise crossover with Among Us in early December. It also landed on Switch in 2023, added free content, and continued to be worth every single cent you put into it. It was my game of choice on the Steam Deck, and I strongly suggest everyone get it. It’s just that good.

    Baldur’s Gate 3

    The second major highlight of the D&D year was arguably the best game released all year. Don’t trust me though, the Video Game Advertisements gave it an award too – but didn’t let them stay and talk about a team member who died because there were more trailers to show! Fun fact, apparently 41.5 minutes of the nearly 4 hour show was spent on award announcements and speeches. In other words, the Video Game Trailers Show sucks, Geoff Keighley is a pandering sack of shit that doesn’t care about video games, and Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the best games ever made.

    The original two games, and the spinoff Neverwinter Nights series, stand as some of the greatest RPGs ever made. The game Planescape: Torment, often tops the list of greatest ever, and arguably so (my personal top is Final Fantasy VI or Fallout New Vegas). It was simultaneously under-the-radar, while also being hugely hyped up, because as it got closer and closer to release, what was being said just became more and more bonkers.

    You know, like the bear sex.

    When the first reviews started to hit, the hype only increased, because people were overwhelmingly in love with the game. Part of that excitement is that Larian Studios made a game that didn’t have any microtransactions, day-0 DLC packs, or all the other crap that modern games “have to have.” It was just pay the money and you get to play the game, all of the game, and enjoy it. That aspect was so refreshing as to seem revolutionary, which is sad, because it’s how things used to work.

    That being said, the game itself is awesome, the hype is absolutely deserved. It’s a giant, sprawling, beautiful game. How you can play is unique almost every time, because there’s that D&D aspect of “rolls” tied in to checks, where you can be overpowered and still fail, or underpowered and succeed gloriously. Every quest had multiple, sometimes non-obvious, ways to solve and resolve them… better yet, sometimes, you could just fail and the game let you go on. The story was good and interesting, the companions were legitimately great and wonderful, and the gameplay managed to feel like D&D even with necessary changes to make it… not suck.

    And, of course, bear sex*.

    *Spoiler for this joke: it’s a druid companion you can romance, not an actual bear

    Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

    I didn’t get super far into this game, but it basically controlled a few weeks of my life, and currently dominates my daughter’s life. Discussions with her right now are 2% what’s going on for an eleven-year-old and 98% talking endlessly about Zelda. I get to go full “god, I’m old” in response and point out that “yes, I know, I played the original back in 86” when it comes to Zelda lore.

    Much like Baldur’s Gate 3, it was a complete game, not split off into a lot of cosmetic loot box or mini DLC nonsense. Of course, for a lot of Nintendo (but not all, their mobile offerings are pure gacha garbage)  games that’s normal. It didn’t fix most of the fundamental issues I had with Breath of the Wild – a great game but by no mean’s perfect. There was still terrible direction-setting of what to do and a flow of the game, weapon durability is still a garbage mechanic that serves no real purpose other than to annoy people, and it’s just as incomprehensible as any other Zelda game.

    Yet… the loop is so satisfying and it’s still a Zelda game. More than that, the biggest marvel, is that the game is just huge. More than triple the size of the original game, with new modes of play and unique things to it that make it so, so satisfying. There was so much to it that just… works. It also pushes the switch to the absolute max, making a legitimately gorgeous game on a console that was old and out of date when it launched.

    Bad Video Games and Worse Companies Making Them

    2023 was a garbage year for video games, despite the great stuff I listed above. Layoffs and studio closures dominated the industry, often not even for failed projects, but perfectly successful ones where the company needed to make a nickel and couldn’t dare cut CEO salary or stop doing stock buybacks, so they instead laid off thousands of workers.

    Even with that, though, there were some things that just stood out as games.

    Starfield

    I’m sure some people in our Discord knew that this game was going to end up here, because I was pretty vocal on all of my problems with the game as I was playing it. Which I did, a lot, because it’s a Bethesda game and they have some things that I genuinely like. Maybe. Or maybe not…

    Maybe it’s time to just acknowledge that Bethesda make kind of crappy games that rely on the community to make not suck. Skyrim was not a good game, but you could make it good. Honestly, think about it… how many of you that have played it can explain what the plot of Skyrim is? Or those who enjoyed it have memories you enjoy that are related at all to that plot… or was it all the other things you could do?

    It pains me to think that, because I like games like Fallout 3 and 4, but they’re also… you know… not good. Fallout 4’s main plot was infamously bad, the companions were memes, and the best parts of the game had nothing to do at all with playing the story. It was little side quests, building, or doing weird and random things. Fallout 3’s ending was so bad they had to program and charge everyone for a DLC to write a better one.

    An aside, but the last act of Baldur’s Gate 3 was much weaker than the first two, and a lot of players were unsatisfied with how some stories wrapped up. Larian listened to player feedback and… patched in new stuff to fix that for free. Bethesda on the other hand screwed over Fallout 3 players more than a decade ago by charging for DLC to undue the stupid ending.

    So this was a chance at redemption, to prove they could do something great… and they really didn’t. Starfield is their first new IP of this century (or as my daughter liked to twist the knife when I made my ’86 comment and pointed out that was “last millennium”) – and it was hyped for years, first being teased with a single title screen eight years ago.

    The end product is a devoid, lifeless, mostly boring husk. Remember how No Man’s Sky was overhyped and ultimately disappointing? This is worse, because that was just a small studio that clearly overcommitted… this is a major AAA company backed with Microsoft money who underdelivered and made a repetitive and pointless game.

    I should do a whole review of it, in fact I was planning on doing it, but ultimately couldn’t get the motivation to do it. So much of the game is just examples where things were quarter-assed to stick in, with clearly too many ideas and not enough refinement of them, and it all comes together as a jumbled, unfun mess.

    The worst part, for me, was coming to this game right after playing Baldur’s Gate 3. A game so full of choices and personality, with interesting and fantastic companions who were all distinct and unique, and a story that drew you in while not sitting you entirely on rails. Yes, one is an “open” (and empty) world game, while the other is a structured linear experience, but they are the two biggest RPGs of the year and couldn’t be further apart in underlying execution and quality.

    You legitimately build, grow, and earn trust with the people around you in Baldur’s Gate 3. It goes to great length to make you the “hero” but not call you the special. In fact, at one point, you find out that a good portion of your companions are getting the exact same “special one” things you are… you just happen to be the one that the game is centered on as POV.

    In Starfield, you’re immediately just trusted (or hated) by everyone. Strangers on the street, on a planet you’ve never been too, walk up and give you life details or quests. The intro is quite literally “here, take my ship, you’re the hero now” and that’s it. And often, there are clearly multiple ways something could be done, but because they didn’t design it that way, you only have one choice to make and one way to go. The only time you have options are when it explicitly gives you more than one.

    Which is all to say it’s a bad game that has already been mostly forgotten. But hey, their first big update will be adding “new ways to travel” between pointless planets where you can accomplish nothing. Maybe it’s telling that the best game in any of the modern Bethesda settings was the one not made by Bethesda.

    I spent a lot of hours in Starfield, even “beating” the main story, trying to find the good game. But it’s just not there. Also, before anyone jumps in that you have to play it “such and such” way, or play it for so long before it gets good… those are both things that terrible games do.

    Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

    It’s weird to put a game I play daily on the bad list, but I’ve talked about how this is a game with a satisfying loop and little else before. They put out a needless version this year of what was a hacked-together story no one remembers at this point, and the same fun multiplayer loop. Cheating is still rampant, there is both too much and not enough to do, and it’s stuffed to the gills with microtransactions.

    Really, it’s here because there was no reason for this to come out. MW2 was a solid game that was fun to play. MW3 was rushed and adds nothing of value overall. But still commanded a $70+ price tag supported by absurdly expensive cosmetic micro-transactions.

    Tabletop

    This will be a little bit different from the other sections, because my good and my bad for this category all stem from the same general places: Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro, Games Workshop, and Asmodee. Those are the three biggest “gaming” companies out there in the tabletop space, and the makers of the games that I deal with.

    Games Workshop Games

    I’ve been a player of almost everything that Games Workshop has done for years now. I’ve written about it here, covered it in depth with the calendars in 2022, and it’s been my primary hobby for several years. It started with Necromunda all the way back in 1996, which fun fact, I bought while I was traveling to Texas (I lived in the northern US back then) to visit a friend in the Army and drop off a car. We’d stopped off at a hobby store while going through Oklahoma City, saw it on the shelf, and figured it’d be fun to play with our friend while down there.

    That was a very expensive path to start down. That spiraled into Warhammer Fantasy, then Warhammer 40k, and I’ve taken several breaks over the years, but back in 2020, got back in, and play Necromunda (again, the new version), Warhammer 40k, Age of Sigmar, and several other games. Kill Team, and slow-planning an Old World army for when I see my friend again that I used to play Fantasy way back when.

    That being said… Games Workshop can be an absolutely infuriating company to be a fan and customer of. While a lot of their “fans” ascribe them to be some kind of sinister cabal and empire, they’re often the epitome of “don’t ascribe to malice what could be chalked up to incompetence.” They’re firmly stuck in the past, for better or worse, and they make decisions to protect their bottom line and sales.

    Capitalism sucks, and they are a company – not a friend, which means they will make decisions that will piss people off. Like releasing rules for free for 10th edition, which happened last year, only to start pulling them as books get released. Or constantly releasing and “patching” the game as they lean harder and harder into the more competitive modes of play, neglecting the casual and narrative players that make up the bulk of their player base.

  • Fan of Metal Gear Solid? You Might Want This Board Game Adaptation

    Fan of Metal Gear Solid? You Might Want This Board Game Adaptation

    Just when I thought I was done with board games, along comes this… thing… from CMON. I say thing with a touch of disdain and a bit of excitement because CMON is doing the thing that Nick touched upon in his review of the LEGO NES set and that is preying on our nostalgia. Or at least banking on it.

    I haven’t played all of the Metal Gear games, but of all the games I have played there were two that are real standouts for me: Metal Gear Solid for PlayStation, and Metal Gear Solid for Game Boy Color (especially the GBC one; it was amazing how much they were able to pack into that game). So having a tabletop version with co-op play for 1-4 players is hitting all the right buttons for me.

    Sneak around using the cardboard box!

    Another plus to this game is that it’s an all-in-one, no-kickstarter-add-ons b.s., complete package. That’s one thing that kinda drives me crazy about a lot of Kickstarter campaigns: so many of them have add-ons that drives the cost up using FOMO to drain your bank account. I like the games that have just one package and that’s it. You get it all without having to pick and choose. This game is not Kickstarter and does just that: you get everything for one price.

    And just to add some icing to the cake, you get three bonuses if you pre-order the game. This version is called the Integral Edition and you’ll get: a $10 discount off the retail price of $110, and a Metal Gear REX miniature, and a graphic novel. The regular price of the game is $110, but pre-orders will see a price of $100.

    Solid Snake for scale.

    The Metal Gear Rex “miniature” is gigantic at 13cm tall. I’m assuming regular retail editions will have a carboard token instead of the miniature. I hope the Integral Edition comes with it too.

    The graphic novel is designed to immerse you into the game further by providing the narrative for each mission. This sounds like the offline paper version of a cinematic.

    Here’s a trailer with more details:

    I’ve had this itching feeling that this game was familiar to me, like I’ve seen it before. And I did! It used to be an IDW game that never saw production. Not sure what the reasoning was but it is basically back from the dead with a new publisher and the world is now a better place for it.

    I’ve given a lot of thought about Nick’s piece and his comments on nostalgia. It was the first thing I thought of when I saw this. How does one not fall prey to companies tugging at those strings? It’s hard man, not gonna lie. Am I victim here or am I spending my money wisely? The gameplay could suck but I’m willing to take that risk. There’s a draft rulebook out there that one can download and peruse to make a more informed decision. But I’m flying blind here. I want this thing.

    You can pre-order Metal Gear Solid: The Board Game – Integral Edition directly from CMON on Backerkit. Just brace yourself for the shipping cost. It ended up being $32.61 for me.

  • Nick’s Painting Table: A Red Grimdark Tide Before the End of June

    Nick’s Painting Table: A Red Grimdark Tide Before the End of June

    I was going to come up with a more concise title, but that didn’t feel on brand for me or for a post talking about Warhammer 40,000, so I went with one that feels pretty on brand for a game that gives us titles like “Necromunda: The Aranthian Succession – The Vaults of Temenos” or “Liber Mechanicum: Forces of the Omnissiah Army Book.” Okay, one of those is a Horus Heresy book, but they were the longest books when I turned around to look at my book shelf. There are longer, but I’m lazy.

    This post is not about books.

    It’s about what we wargamers / miniature collectors / hobbyists colloqually call “the pile of shame.” Some try to call it a pile of opportunity, or pile of opportunity, but they’re kidding themselves, we all know. All of us buy more models and miniatures than we will ever be able to play with or field or paint even if we managed to gain immortality or the kind of money that means you never have to worry about working again. Of course, seemingly, the problem with that money, if the current world is any indication and we haven’t managed to get the guillotines out yet, is that getting that much money only seems to make you want to get more money, burn the world, and screw over as many other people as possible. See… well, all of the billionaires.

    I’ll never use all of these characters at once – in fact, I can’t. If I ever build a full Chapter, I will need 10 captains, so… I’m almost there. I’ve also got all of the “classic” Blood Angels characters in their itty-bitty Finecast forms, which is code for “terrible and too small.” There’s also the infamous Bladeguard Ancient – quite possibly the most common unpainted Space Marine in everyone’s collection. He’s sucked for all of 9th edition, and was in the launch box.

    Anyway, tangent aside, I’ve got a stupid amount of unfinished models and a stupid amount of games that I won’t ever play. I’ve already got a habit of jumping into a game, never playing it, and getting rid of the game when I finally give up. I’ve written here about Fallout Wasteland Warfare, which I’ve since sold off completely. I’ve also picked up, and sold off, multiple Warhammer 40k armies, Warhammer Age of Sigmar armies, and whole tabletop games (Conquest, Star Wars Armada, Blood Bowl).

    Decision making in this realm may not be my strong suit.

    There has been a pretty consistent line throughout all of it, though, and that’s my Blood Angels army that kicked off me getting back into Warhammer when the pandemic started and I was stuck inside, and has been around as the Pandemic continued but we have pretended it ended and I just stayed inside. My vampire boys weren’t my first 40k army… that was actually Eldar back in the early editions, but they were the Space Marine faction I’d started way back when and never got around to painting well.

    I love tanks, and was recently vindicated in this from a lore perspective. The book “First Founding” by Black Library specifically called out that the Blood Angels have always had a larger armor pool than most chapters, despite their reputation for close combat. Here, we have three Sicaran Tanks – all resin bricks from ForgeWorld that have since started to come out in plastic, the classic Blood Angels Baal Predator I’ve never gotten around to painting, and a Repulsor – one of the newest Space Marine Primaris tanks.

    There are a lot of reasons I went for them… I like the look, the lore, the backstory. And for some really strange reason, if you know what my background and beliefs are, I really like the motif of Angels and stuff like that. So the Angels of Death – the name given to two chapters of Space Marines, the Blood Angels and Dark Angels, have always been my jam. The Vampire Boys (which it talked about in our Advent Calendar run through last year) in particular lean into this extra hard, given that their Primarch was a literal Angel, their elite guard wears winged jetpacks, and they strap jetpacks on to everything to descend from the sky.

    Warhammer 40,000 is not a game of subtlety.

    My Blood Angels army was started as a Crusade force for a league at my local store, and has just grown along the way. I’m by no means a great painter… my shirt “world’s okayest miniature painter” is quite truthful. I paint to get miniatures on the tabletop and looking pretty good, and that’s about it. I’m always looking to improve and get better, but won’t be winning awards, or trying to win awards, anytime soon.

    Back to that pile of shame, though… one of the things about playing the game, and a weird thing about Warhammer and Games Workshop games in particular, is how much of their customer base only buys models for the hobby aspect, and not the game aspect. Or how many only want the game aspect and don’t care about the hobby. To be across both like I am is fairly rare, and as I get older I need to acknowledge that I’m probably more hobby than gaming just because I don’t have time, even if I buy like I play 40 hours a day, every day.

    Another “every Space Marine Player has some of these selection” – this is dominated by the remnants of my Indomitus boxes, which I’ve had since summer of 2020 and never finished. Outriders and Assault Intercessors were both a big part of that box. I’ve actually painted A LOT of Assault Intercessors, these I’m just repainting because they looked awful, so I stripped them and rebased coated. Five regular Intercessors, which round out the big squads, heavy Intercessors, and the Death Company which have been just primed black forever, make up the rest.

    This means I have a collection of models that I could field to play a bunch of different armies if I wanted, including three different space marine chapters: Blood Angels, Dark Angels, and Ultramarines. The Dark Angels are a relatively new addition, because I wanted to build a full Angels of Death force that fit with the “Arks of Omen” lore established at the end of 9th edition… basically the stories currently going on in game. The Ultramarines are there because they’re the default guys and you just get some, but also because I wanted to paint something blue, have a subscription to a monthly service called Imperium Magazine that’s sending me stuff, and it’s just something to have. The three armies play differently, and I like painting space marines, and this also lets me have loaner armies… in theory, if I finished painting them all.

    Right now, about 2/3rds of my 40k Blood Angels* are fully painted, based (the stands are decorated and painted), and battle ready. Recently, Games Workshop announced the next edition of the game coming out, 10th edition, and with it, a whole slew of new models and releases. Yeah, I’m a sucker, and I’m going to buy those models. Currently, the rumor is that they’ll go up for preorder in a month, on June 10th, and get released on June 24th. Which leaves about a month and a half before the next edition, and all of the new fancy Space Marines, come out.

    *This qualifier is important, because I have some Horus Heresy (30k) Blood Angels that aren’t fully painted, and I don’t feel as rushed to finish them since I can’t field them in games of 40k. 

    I have a bunch of Blood Angels and I’m going to buy more. I don’t care. In theory, a Codex Compliant – a chapter that’s built according to the rules laid down after the heresy, has no more than 1,000 ish marines, divided up into 10 companies of 100 marines each. I’m well, well short of a full thousand. But if I paint everything, I’m likely getting pretty close to at least two and a half chapters. Blood Angels are a mostly compliant chapter. Most chapters are somewhat loose in how they organize their first company of veterans, because the life of a Space Marine is violent and unlikely to last to veteran status. That means they don’t count them in the full number a lot if there happen to be a lot around.

    This represents the stuff that I have that’s closest to done… most of it just needs finishing touches, washes, basing, or things like that. Assault Marines, Infiltrators, Incursors, Rievers, and some Desolation Marines all are very close to done. A big Brutalis Dreadnought in the back just wants to give (pointy) hugs, while his two Dreadnought friends are just base coated but honestly don’t need much. The Warsuit behind everyone I’ve had for ages but never felt the need to field, because it’s just objectively worse than the Dreadnoughts that cost the same. Fun little fact about this picture, the oldest Warhammer 40k Space Marine model I own is in here… the Attack Bike is the tiny metal version from the late 90s.

    My marines are painted up as part of the 1st (Veterans), 3rd, and 4th companies – or they will be expanding in those directions. Someday, I’m going to get a full chapter assembled and painted, it will be glorious and stupid and pointless, but that’s not what this is all about. This is about trying to get through that other 1/3rd that’s unpainted, partially painted, or just not done yet.

    So this is about trying to get through the miniatures that I put in the pictures throughout this post that are unfinished, and probably posting some status updates over the next few weeks to see if I can actually do it. You know, before I dump another pile on top of my already substantial pile of shame.

    Because I’m not counting my Dark Angels, Ultramarines, Necrons, Eldar, Orks, Stormcast Eternals, Gloomspite Gitz, Kharadon Overlords (which aren’t even assembled), Lumineth Realmlords, the Van Saar and Escher gangs for Necromunda, the Grand Army of the Republic, my Imperial army lead by Darth Vader, those plucky Rebels, the upcoming Shatterpoint release, all of the Marvel Crisis Protocol stuff, several kill teams, tons of terrain, a Tau Empire force, or the aforementioned Horus Heresy Blood Angels.

    Maybe “pile” isn’t an accurate term for my shame.

    Here’s the full accounting of what’s left to paint in my Blood Angels army, and what’s all left to go with it. 137 models total, with an average of 40% finished. A lot of them are really close. I’m not going to count getting transfers on them as done, as I tend to do that well after the fact, but I am going to count getting them based. As unfinished bases are gross looking. For some shorthand here… 10% means it’s primed (everything is primed at least), 20% means I’ve put down a quick single basecoat color (probably red), 50% to 60% means I’ve probably done most basecoat and need to clean up and layer it, while 80% is in the tidy up and basing phase.

    Model Count % Done
    Captain (Necron Base) 1 80%
    Captain (Phobos) 1 60%
    Captain (Terminator) 1 40%
    Lieutenant (Ork Base) 1 70%
    Lieutenant (Storm Shield) 1 70%
    Lieutenant (Power Fist) 1 50%
    Librarian 1 80%
    Chaplain 1 40%
    Chaplain (Jump Pack) 1 40%
    Sanguinary Priest 1 40%
    Lemartes 1 40%
    Astorath 1 60%
    Tycho 1 60%
    Heavy Intercessor 5 20%
    Assault Intercessor 16 50%
    Intercessors 5 20%
    Reiver 5 80%
    Infiltrator 5 80%
    Incursors 5 80%
    Desolation Squad 5 70%
    Bladeguard Ancient 1 20%
    Outriders 6 30%
    Librarian 1 80%
    Firestrike Turret 1 20%
    Invader ATV 1 50%
    Invictor Warsuit 1 20%
    Death Company 15 30%
    Repulsor 1 20%
    Assault Marines 10 90%
    Tactical Squad 16 10%
    Devistators 10 10%
    Scouts 5 10%
    Attack Bike 1 60%
    Felblade 1 80%
    Sicaran Battle Tank 1 90%
    Sicaran Venator 1 90%
    Sicaran Arcus 1 90%
    Baal Predator 1 10%
    Drop Pod 1 20%
    Leviathan Dreadnought 1 20%
    Contemptor Dreadnought 1 20%
    Death Company Dreadnought 1 10%
    Furioso Dreadnought 1 10%
  • Nick’s 2022 in Review – Streaming, Games, LEGO Sets, and All the Other Stuff

    Nick’s 2022 in Review – Streaming, Games, LEGO Sets, and All the Other Stuff

    It’s the in vogue thing to do to remember the year before it ends, but we’re not the most punctual here at FBTB, or more accurately, we all have lives and things to do, so we’re doing it after the first of the year. We have the recap post for our calendar still going to, just waiting for the final little touches as well, so start placing your bets on what month we’ll get that posted. My money is on March.

    I’m not sure that anyone is really going to mourn 2022, any more than we’re going to miss 2021, 2020, or the jokes about how this is just 2020 part 4 starting or whatever. Last year was a tire fire, because that’s the only type of year we get anymore. COVID is still a thing no matter how much we ignore it – and we got to add Monkeypox (yep, that was last year), Super-Strep, RSV, and so many other things on top of that along with it. Reading the news is more about “what is the scandal today” instead of being shocked by the news.

    We all cope in our own ways, through so many nerdy things, and I covered in my calendar review that a good deal of my tastes have changed in recent years. I don’t collect LEGO, and haven’t for some time. I do collect Warhammer, miniatures, and buy lots of things I don’t use a lot of. So, a lot of things haven’t changed.

    All that aside, 2022 wasn’t exactly an a terrible year for me. A lot of it, really, was mostly meh. My kids are doing good, and getting big. I’ll be talking about them plenty in here, because they’re influencing a lot of my choices anymore. I’m not going to talk about “New Years” resolutions in here, because I think they are stupid and you shouldn’t wait for an arbitrary day to improve yourself – that’s why my weight loss and health improvement plan started back in August. As of this writing, there is a third less of me in the world, and that’s always a good thing. There was entirely too much Nick around.

    That was my huge focus of the past few months, far more than gaming or anything else. Still working, and worrying, and anxiety, and every thing else, but mostly, just surviving, which is what everyone does anymore.

    LEGO and other Toys

    You know what, I bought more LEGO in 2022, for myself or for review, than I had in years. The AT-ST wasn’t even among that, because Ace sent that to me for review. Also, yes, I know, the Hoth AT-ST is different – still don’t care, my point about it being super niche is valid and sort of emphasizes that point. There are a bunch of sets I’ve snapped pictures for, and need to write reviews for, in the near future… it was going to come out after the advents.

    Shockingly, most of the sets are Star Wars, so you’ll have to wait and see. Nothing ground breaking, just chances for me to rant a bit. I got one big set in there, but I haven’t opened it yet. I also built one big set that I purchased last year and never got around to opening, so it will probably be the first review that I do. Yeah, I’m being vague. That’s what makes it so suspenseful!

    For other toys… I don’t know that I bought any, honestly. At least not any that weren’t an advent calendar or for a tabletop game. I don’t get action figures, and have sold off all of mine. I don’t even have any display shelves set up around me anymore, because I just don’t have the space for it. Truth is, I’m over most collectable swag and tat. It just takes up space, and don’t care for it.

    Movies, TV (Honestly, Streaming)

    So, I was going through the history of our posts to remember what I watched last year, to see that the Media post never got published because someone *cough* Ace *cough* never finished his part in it. Funny thing is that what I did last year also really reflected in this year.

    I had to dig through a lot of my streaming history to figure out if I actually watched a full, proper movie this year. My wife and I watched Parasite at one point, finally. I watched The Adam Project last March. We watch National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation every year for Christmas. I wouldn’t qualify the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special as a movie, but I did finally watch it. I don’t really count the dozens of movies I watched on Rifftrax and Mystery Science Theater 3000, but there are also those. Movie-wise, that’s about it. I didn’t watch any Marvel movies, or even rewatch any Marvel movies. I skimmed and skipped around a few Star Wars movies for reference, but that was more to find individual things.

    One thing I did not do, and never even made plans to do, was to go to a theater. Theaters, in general, are a thing that I don’t really enjoy. They’re too expensive, for me at least, especially around here. Taking my wife and kids to the movie, with popcorn, candy, and drinks, can very easily get above $100 for a matinee show. That being said, I know I’m going to at least one movie this year… the Super Mario Movie. My son is just crazy into Mario now, and honestly, I don’t think it looks all that bad. Disposable popcorn fare, sure, but that’s most movies to me anymore.

    That’s not to say I didn’t watch anything, though. I don’t watch movies, but I consumed a lot of shows and streaming this year. It’s easy to make jokes about how subscription services are just the new cable (and I’m pretty sure I made that point in articles years ago – this is basically what we were always going to get with the demand that we just be able to buy the channels we want). I have the Disney Plus subscription with Hulu, but also carry Paramount+ (because Star Trek and my son’s other favorite, Paw Patrol),

    Because we never posted our 2021 list – so I didn’t share the stuff that I discovered and started watching last year. Letterkenny, The Witcher, Only Murders in the Building, and What We Do in the Shadows were the shows that I started watching and loved in 2021, and they all got new seasons in 2022 (or very late 2021 and again in very late 2022 for Letterkenny).

    Peacemaker

    This may be the most NSFW thing I’ve ever shared on the site. Seriously, do not watch this around… anyone.

    I commented in my Advent Calendar Review that I didn’t watch a lot of comic stuff this year, or at least I didn’t watch a lot of Marvel comic stuff. I’d caught up on all the Marvel series last year through Hawkeye, which I really enjoyed (enough that it was on my 2021 list), but I’m just sort of over the MCU at this point. How do you get to Endgame and then keep upping the stakes? It gets tiring.

    You know what I did love, enough that I’ve watched it three times? Peacemaker. I’m not exactly enthused for Gunn’s actions on DC and all the stuff he’s done (even if it means that I get Cavill producing a Warhammer 40k universe launch over on Amazon). I never got around to reviewing it – and I really should – but I watched and actually liked the Snyder Justice League redo. Which is shocking, because I rather disliked Batman v Superman. I watched the Suicide Squad movie Gunn did, and it was… fine. The standout character in it was most certainly John Cena’s Peacemaker, who was the answer to the question “what would it be like if Captain America was a complete asshole?” – not like US Patriot, that’s more like misguided. This is taking the best and worse and going to 11. It’s honestly hard to describe.

    The stinger at the end of the movie where he seemingly died (I mean, spoilers, I guess, for a two year old film) set up the show, released at the start of 2022, and a lot of people were skeptical – myself included. Cena was a wrestler turned actor, and could he carry a show? The answer to that is a resounding yes. Not just in action, but there is absolute depth and so many facets to the characters on the show that you just need to watch. Peacemaker was an asshole you were supposed to hate in Suicide Squad, and you do, and still will, in the show. But you will also understand, hate, sympathize, and start to love him too. All of them, at once. There isn’t a weak performance on the show (well, except one unfortunate cameo at the end – but that’s more because of the actor).

    That and he plays piano on the show. It’s a brief scene, but it’s actually Cena doing it, and he taught himself to do it, just because he wanted to. That’s pretty cool.

    Shoresy

    I mentioned Letterkenny above, and I love that show – even if the recently released Season 11 is probably their weakest season. Still funny, absolutely, but lacking in the overall cohesive humor that most have. This past year also had the first big spinoff (other than the animated one from the main show) – Shoresy, starring Jared Kelso’s (show creator and the main character Wayne in Letterkenny) background character Shorsey leaving town and playing hockey elsewhere. On the main show, he was simply the comic character that was there to make fun of two other hockey players, Riely and Jonsey… you just sort of have to watch, and we never saw his face. It was just a running gag of him talking in a funny, high voice and often appearing bare-assed on screen and making “your mom” jokes.

    That’s what makes the spinoff show such a surprise. The crude and lowbrow humor is most certainly still there. It’s an essential part of what makes these things work. Humor that’s so basic yet sophisticated, full of fart and poop jokes that are somehow layered. More than that, though, compared to Letterkenny, this short series has a cohesive storyline and plot that runs through the season, and it gives both Kelso and the cast a lot more to do and act around. There’s depth to the characters that we don’t get in the main show. That’s not a knock on Letterkenny, because that’s part of the charm… the simplicity is the whole purpose of the small town, and often the reason the depth they have is simply stated and just happens.

    It’s all very, very Canadian – and continues that strange trend of how Canada has something like fifty thousand TV shows and only a thousand actors. Like everything Kelso does, it filmed on location in Canada, used a lot of Native actors for Native roles (far more than Letterkenny does, even), but kept the things that work well from the other show.

    Ted Lasso

    My wife and I were late to the game for Ted Lasso, and that sort of works in our favor. We missed the initial hype and the backlash that comes with all popular shows, so we got to enjoy it a lot. It’s surprisingly deep and enjoyable, a lot more than you’d think at first glance, and doesn’t shy away from some of the gut punches. Problem is that now we are on the boat with everyone else in wondering when season 3 is coming out. They missed the World Cup premiere, which seemed like the perfect time, and Apple isn’t known for actually… sharing anything.

    Star Trek: Prodigy

    This was… such a weird year for Star Trek. Discovery Season 4 started at the end of 2021 and… wasn’t great? I like Discovery, and anyone who feels like whining about new Trek can just go pound sand and continue to be delusional (and likely ignore the fact that they’re just repeating the same things said when TNG, DS9, and Voyager all came out). The actors in it are fantastic and I love the ship. Short Treks is legit fun and it brought that to us. But the latest season was uneven and rushed at best, and the story was just not all that enjoyable.

    Picard Season 2, which followed it was, and this is hard for me to say as an unabashed lover of Patrick Stewart and TNG, probably the worst Star Trek ever made this side of the Enterprise finale. I hated watching it, the plot, and just what it was doing. The whole idea of “let’s take the world right now, go two years in the future, and make it a little bit worse” was just bad. So very, very bad. Also, let’s give Picard some more secret Trauma, because the guy who’s been captured and tortured by the Cardassians and the Borg, used by the Borg to murder tens of thousands of his fellow Starfleet crewmen, and subject to dozens of other real and known things clearly needed more. It was just awful.

    Following on that, thankfully, we got Strange New Worlds, which gave us the thing that will make it so I will never hate Discovery no matter what it does, Anson Mount as Christopher Pike and the Enterprise pre-Kirk (well, mostly). This show was such a revelation and absolutely wonderful. We’re talking more of a shift going from The Motion Picture to Wrath of Khan. This is like going from Star Wars’ Holiday Special to Empire Strikes Back (which, I guess, also happened). That was quickly followed by Lower Decks, which is my favorite of the new Treks and gave us the wonderful DS9 episode everyone needs to watch.

    But this entry is about Prodigy, the Star Trek show aimed at kids and launched under the Nickelodeon brand. Everything about that sentence gave me pause, and led me to ignore it at first. And I did, until the next entry on my list got me to change my mind because I rapidly consumed everything I could and needed a next thing to watch.

    It has an uneven start, at least to an adult, because the thing you need to remind yourself is that it’s a kid’s show. It’s also a Star Trek show, and uneven starts and iffy first seasons are kind of what they do (unless you’re Strange New Worlds or Lower Decks – or parts of Voyager* and DS9**). The focal character, Dal, is extremely annoying when you meet him, something that doesn’t really change over several episodes. But that’s also kind of the point – the whole first season is about growth and change of these kids.

    Watching through the whole season, it’s hard to overstate just how well Prodigy captures the spirit of what Star Trek is, and how well the main characters exemplify it. The voice acting on the show, across the board, is superb, but a special callout for the incredible job that Kate Mulgrew does as Kathryn Janeways (not a typo). There is more character development and growth across the first season than in any other first season of Trek, and honestly, I’m willing to call it the best first season of Trek that’s ever been done. Yes, even better than Lower Deck’s season 1.

    *It was short, mostly because a chunk of the season one episodes were sprinkled in at the start of season 2, but overall more good than bad.

    **Emissary, Duet, In the Hands of the Prophets are all in the first season. So is The Forsaken, which has the absolute best moment you’ll ever get with Lwaxana Troi

    Andor

    I saved this one for last, because, holy crap. Just… holy crap. This is something we should review – not just because it’s Star Wars, but because I want an excuse to watch it all again. I’d been fairly burnt out on Star Wars since Rise of Skywalker crapped its way on to movie screens everywhere. I love Mandalorian, and I even liked Boba Fett, but they were also the sort of thing that I watched and was just kind of done with. I hadn’t gotten around to Resistance or Bad Batch, because of said burnout, and never got around to Obi-Wan either until after I started watching Andor and then it all just sort of exploded for me.

    I went back and immediately watched Obi-Wan (I enjoyed it, it’s fine, but more disposable) and Bad Batch (much better, and kind of like shades of seeing what is to come). Then I watched Andor again, because it’s absolutely amazing, and it makes you want to dive into the deep with Star Wars. It’s hard to dig into it too much without spoilers, and maybe I’ll do a third watch through to cover it here, because any show that makes woodwind-based marching band music tense-as-hell deserves your attention.

    Video Games

    2022 was a very strange year for Video Games for me. I… for about 95% of the year, I played the same few games I always paly – Call of Duty, sprinkled in with a bit of Star Trek Online and even a little bit of Star Wars the Old Republic. At some point in the middle of the year, the PlayStation 5 I’d ordered months before hand showed up and surprised me, so there was that, and I played Horizon Forbidden West for a bit before getting distracted. I never really went back to it.

    Part of the problem is that this year, my five-year-old son discovered two things: the Nintendo Switch and Super Mario games. The Switch, and by extension, the TV, have apparently become his now. So I don’t get on the TV all that much, as it’s shared between the whole family. I can jump on late at night, but don’t tend to. Most of my gaming as of late has been on the PC, and that just tends to be my guilty pleasure games, like throwing money to the terrible beast of Activision|Blizzard with CoD and World of Warcraft (yeah, I know, no ethical consumption in capitalism and all that… sometimes you just have to take the slime to make it so your brain can deal with the other crap).

    But at the end of the year, a few things changed. I decided I was going to do a couple of upgrades to my PC, which was pushing about four years old, and nabbed a deal for some parts. I may have also gone… a bit all out. I was able to get a bundle that put me at the top-edge of the AMD world, which, yeah, there are some trade-offs for that, but also, some upsides. So now I’m sitting on a Ryzen 7950X and a 7900XTX video card that can heat up my room pretty well when I feel like pushing it.

    My old rig was fine, it could still play any game out there, not even hitting the bottom rung of requirements. I have a PS5 and Xbox One X (though, aforementioned TV sharing issues – and we’re that weird family who only has one TV), but haven’t had a whole lot of things grabbing my attention on consoles as of late.

    Weirdly, the game that grabbed my attention and got me playing games again, admittedly after my computer upgrade (which wasn’t just about gaming, it was about a lot of other work too, and turning the old parts into a home server and storage box). It doesn’t come close to pushing this new machine. Or my old machine. Or my Steam Deck. Or my iPad.

    Vampire Survivors

    That game is Vampire Survivors, and it is amazing. It’s a game that has no business working as well as it does. It’s vaguely a rogue-like survival game, two genres which I don’t generally get all that enthused for (though I loved Hades last year). It’s an auto-attacker style game, which means you basically don’t do anything other than move. The graphics are all pixel-based and very basic, and it’s firmly in the indie scene.

    This starts to go a lot worse for me in a bit

    The design of the game is also built on top of a whole lot of gambling mechanics – the developer worked in the gambling and casino industry… but that’s the whole twist of the game. It’s random and hits like a slot machine, but there are no transactional elements to it. None whatsoever, and it’s designed to prevent it. In fact, the developer, in seeing that people were making crap knockoffs of the game and uploading them on mobile platforms, just went and developed a version and released it for free on iOS and Android. There are two optional ads that can be watched to support it – one to get a rez, one to get a bonus reward at the end. And that’s it.

    Sometimes, the game just decides it wants you dead. I swear, my character is in there somewhere.

    On PC, Mac, and consoles, it’s worth every cent. It’s a satisfying gameplay loop, and even though it looks like there’s just a little bit of content, but that’s not even close to true. See, the game is a true throwback, because it decides to do something quaint, and reward you for playing.

    You unlock characters by playing and doing things. You unlock stages by playing and doing things. You unlock different music by playing and doing things. Remember when that’s how you got stuff, and it wasn’t just a charge, or DLC, or something like that? Remember when you didn’t have to buy boosters or level bonus helpers or assistants or season passes? Remember when a game was just a game?

    It’s so satisfying for there to be a mechanic that’s just about rewarding you for opening something you earn in the game, and giving you something. And that’s it!

    Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters

    Square|Enix is a company that spent all of 2022 going “hold my beer” to every video game company getting bad press. They sold off most of their non-Final Fantasy games, have decided that NFTs are the future (spoiler: they are not, they have, and always will be, a ponzi scheme at best to sell to idiots, and if you like them or want to defend them, you are also an idiot). They’re still doing that, and even though Actiblizz is a shitshow, Ubisoft is just… terrible, EA predatory, Nintendo anti-competitive, and Microsoft is the Borg… Square|Enix somehow ends up being worse.

    Their business model, going forward, seems to be basically re-re-re-re-releasing the same things over and over. Luckily, though, they finally, at long last, released the Pixel Remaster versions on platforms other than the PC and mobile – hitting both Playstation and Switch in December (not coming to Xbox, sadly). To celebrate, they ended up on a very good sale on PC, and they work great on the Steam Deck, which as I mentioned above, I had picked up around Christmas. I’m likely going to end up writing about it because I got it for a pretty specific reason, which I’ve written about before here.

    I love these games, though, they’re a huge part of my childhood, so getting to play through them again is a big bonus. I’ve played through them on my iOS devices, and… they’re fine. But they belong on a console and controller. And now they can be.

    Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West

    I barely played one of these (Forbidden West), but have spent quite a bit of time playing the other – on my new computer build. I’d played the original game a lot on my PS4, it was fantastic and one of my favorite games of that whole generation. It’s been a great game to go back and just enjoy for the fun of it. I don’t have a whole lot to say on it, really, other than it’s weird to see Sony be slowly, begrudgingly, drug into the reality of supporting things outside of their console world.

    Also, I’m eventually going to get around to playing more Forbidden West, really. It was a good game. Also, I need to play the new God of War.

    Tabletop and Books

    If my Advent Calendar stuff wasn’t a hint, the tabletop was where I put a good portion of my year. Warhammer 40k and its offshoot games like Kill Team and Necromunda were my big mini games, along with a little bit of Age of Sigmar (the fantasy version), continued dabbling with Star Wars Legion and Marvel Crisis Protocol continuing, and completely checking out of Fallout Wasteland Warfare as well as a large chunk of my Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures (well before all of the kerfuffle with the OGL stuff, but more on that later).

    The first army I’m working on this year is my Necron force. They’re a great representation of the state of my hobby, as I’ve had a lot of these minis since I got back into 40k back when the Pandemic started…

    I also completely exited the 3D printing hobby – I just realized that it’s not something I like or enjoy doing. I really enjoy the maker space, I do, and I like dabbling and working with things. I am still going to do those things… but printing just isn’t here yet. It’s interesting, and it can be fun, but it’s also frustrating, messy, time consuming, and expensive. You end up spending more time troubleshooting, tweaking, and repairing than you do actually printing. Especially when you deal with the consumer-grade end of the spectrum. The support of companies that are big in the space are just the worst to deal with for what one would charitably call support.

    I also don’t print things for my main tabletop games – yeah, Warhammer is a very expensive hobby. So is LEGO. Much like how that doesn’t justify going out and stealing sets, or buying knock-off sets, it doesn’t justify buying recasts or the pure knockoffs either. Companies like LEGO and GW are not our friends, and they don’t need or have to price things to “be nice” or “fair.” Capitalism sucks, and it is inherently predatory. Those companies exist to make money, and they will often do baffling and annoying things, but the option for us is to always just “not buy it” and “not participate.”

    Some of these were painted in 2021, some of them were painted in 2022. What can I say, I like tanks.

    I don’t really begrudge the people who want to go and print custom armies, and have no issue with custom terrain or bits or the like – or even printing models for stuff that’s out of print. Where I take issue is when people start doing it instead of purchasing the products from smaller local stores that are the lifeblood of the hobby and local scene. Often with the justification of “I buy my paints there to support them.” Yeah, buying $20 worth of paints doesn’t make up for the amount those stores makes up off even one model kit, let alone an army. Support your local stores, even when that means you also have to buy from the company that kind of sucks. Unless that company is Wizards of the Coast, because f*** them.

    The year was started by working on my Orks. I didn’t finish them, but did get a fair number of them painted. Sadly, they got kinda nerfed pretty bad, but have since come back, so may have to dust them off. The picture is also blurry because I focused on the wrong thing but I’m not going to fix it. Cause I’m lazy.

    I played some Dungeons and Dragons this year, but my big, long-running homebrew campaign wrapped up late last year and I never started up another one as a DM. I sort of took the time off and haven’t worked on my homebrew setting at all. I sometimes miss it, but I often don’t, because it’s just so much extra work. Gaming while adult is hard… and goes something like this:

    When is everyone free? Okay, how about three weeks from now. Okay, let’s plan on that, I’ll send out something, let’s plan for this time. Send reminders for the next couple of week. Get notices at the last minute that people can’t make it. Frantically reschedule at the last minute. Shocked messages from a couple others that it was happening. Game gets postponed. Repeat process. 

    I have a group online where we do get together, but life just gets in the way, and our campaign became two or three mini-campaigns, one-shots, and things to try out. We did a little Spelljammer, a bit of Eberron, some stuff in the Critical Role setting, and a little bit of a custom world. I’m thinking of running some stuff this year with my fairly deep collection of other systems, like Star Trek Adventures, the Star Wars Narrative Dice System (Edge of the Empire / Age of Rebellion / Force and Destiny), Pathfinder, Starfinder, or maybe even some old-school D&D.

    This is a small sample of some of the potential books. What should I start with here, what would people like to see? Leave a comment or hit us up on the Discord and let me know.

    That was actually one of the things I was doing a lot of this year it was trying to hunt down, collect, and purchase older RPG, hobby, and general nerdy books. In part, because they’re just make me happy and bring up a lot of memories. But also, because I’m considering using them as part of a new content series, maybe something like Bothan Book Club or maybe Midlife Nerd Crisis or something like that. Doing Book Reviews or something like that for ancient books or old content, maybe torturing myself with old Extended Universe books, that sort of thing.

    Looking Forward to 2023

    I mean, it’s already 2023, so this is maybe looking down more than looking forward, so who knows. Last year, I put in a general rule of “not watching trailers” for a whole lot of stuff – especially for TV and Movies. I don’t know that I watched a movie trailer on purpose last year… if it happened, it was because I was watching something where it was on and couldn’t be skipped (like a football game in a commercial, etc.). They’re often too packaged or don’t represent what’s coming… that or, honestly, I just want to be surprised.

    I don’t even really care about spoilers (which are often unavoidable); in fact, if I know I’m not going to see something, which I usually won’t, I’ll just go spoil it for myself. But I want the experience to unfold in watching something, without the context or bias of the trailer. What that all means is that… I don’t really have any movies or shows I’m just waiting for, except for the next season of shows that I’ve already watched. Most don’t even have announcements yet. Shorsey is getting its second season in May, and eventually Ted Lasso is going to get it’s third and final season (which makes me a bit sad, but also I’m glad they’re just ending it).

    Picard Season 3 starts very soon, hopefully it doesn’t suck out loud like season 2 did, and there is more Trek coming after that I’m sure. I’m more excited about Mandalorian Season 3 coming back, and I put the trailer above, but going to be honest – I haven’t watched it (and won’t watch it). I’m going in as blind as possible to the show. We don’t know when Andor is starting back up, but oh my god, I will probably wake up in the middle of the night to watch the premier episode. We just got word that King of the Hill is returning, and so is Futurama, both on Hulu, but neither have a date and I don’t expect either to be this year.

    On the tabletop… things are kind of weird. Dungeons & Dragons maker Wizards of the Coast recent just absolutely crapped all over the bed and pissed off a huge chunk of their fans by giving them the finger, telling them all they were worth is their money, and saying they were going to shut down all the stuff they loved. Then being arrogant and declaring victory after it was revealed that about 90% of 3rd party creators would not use their new system.

    For my part, I’m likely going to fully embrace the worlds of Paizo and their Pathfinder Second Edition system as my fantasy tabletop game of choice. I didn’t mesh with Pathfinder 2E initially, but will give it another go and try to adapt my homebrew world to it. Yes, it’s currently published under the original OGL, which Wizards has now backtracked on and released under the Creative Commons license.

    The issue is that Wizards has lost all trust, and it’s clear that their next product is meant to kill off the existing game, their online tool Beyond D&D, and all of the purchased and created content. So whatever they’re making is bad for players and bad for the game – clearly, whatever is coming is a dead-end product and should be avoided. That means that other things are in order and it’s time to try them.

    For video games, I don’t keep up on a lot of the upcoming releases. I know that Star Wars: Jedi Survivor is coming out, and I’m tentatively looking forward to it. It’s still an EA game, and somehow they became the least evil company out there because they only do old fashioned evil and not all of the new abusive evil. There’s a new Legends of Zelda game we still know next to nothing about, and I probably will have to invest in a second switch by then because my kids have totally co-opted my Switch as their own.

    I’ve poked around all of the LEGO stuff… and yeah, not a whole lot that I’m likely to buy unless it’s explicitly for a review or they happen to make something that’s a big space set (which seems unlikely) or an old video game or computer system (also unlikely, because there’s not a lot left to mine there I don’t think). Mostly, I think, I’m just sort of keeping my 2023 open and going to be pleasantly surprised when something excites me and not let down because I didn’t set a lot of expectations.

  • Our Favorite Games of 2021

    Our Favorite Games of 2021

    What a year. I think it’s safe to say all of us are looking forward to not being in 2021 anymore. I (Eric) am optimistic, but I was optimistic for 2020, and we see where that got us. As per usual, we wrap up our years by talking about our favorite video games that we’ve played. I’m making a small addendum to this, however: let’s throw in tabletop games. I know Ace and Nick are really into them, and I’ve played a ton this year via Tabletop Simulator.

    Without further ado, let’s get this thing started.

    Ace’s Picks

    The year 2021 was/is a bit of haze for me in terms trying to remember what games I’ve played. I do remember a few: Shadow of the Colossus, A Plague Tale: Innocence, Song of the Deep. But there were only two games I want to write about.

    Video Game of the Year: Returnal

    I only started playing Returnal last week, but it is my game of the year. It’s my first roguelike (or rogue-lite, whatever, I don’t want to get into that but you can read this if you’re just as confused about the differences as I am) and I am hooked. I started the game completely blind, as in I had no idea what the story was, how to play, what the objectives were, or anything. I only knew that the developer, Housemarque, was acquired by Sony to join the Playstation Studios family. I don’t think they’d do that if the game sucked. And I also had a vague notion that it was a Groundhog Day kind of game. The trailer was enough to get me excited so I bought it digitally when it was on sale a while ago but finally dove in last week. And am I having a blast.

    Like I said, I didn’t know what to expect or how to play. I just figured things out as I went along. At it’s core, it’s a hack’n’slash game with an element of Groundhog Day. Every time you die, you start over at the beginning where you crash land on an alien planet. From the crash site, you move into the next zone dispatching the alien creatures that want to kill you and picking up consumables and upgrades along the way. You move onto the next zone and rinse and repeat, all the while trying to unlock the secrets of the planet and why you’re stuck in this endless loop.

    It took I don’t know how many death cycles, but I finally figured out what all the glowing stuff was and how to kill all the monsters efficiently.

    It sounds relentless and repetitive but it’s not. Each run is a learning experience. You gain familiarity with the different zones. I haven’t gotten very far in the game so there’s only a handful of them for me right now. But knowing the map helps when it comes time to clear the area of monsters. And knowing the monsters is another learning experience. Memorizing both their attack patterns and the particular room you’re in will have you eliminating them like a pro. Combining jumping, dashing, melee and ranged attacked will come naturally for you so while a room may spawn a ton of baddies, you’ll soon reach a point where killing them becomes second nature and, most importantly fun!

    Just about every pick-up in any given cycle is crucial for survival.

    The game earns its roguelike label from each death you experience. The layout of the zones you go through change with every reset with the only constant being the crash site. Weapon upgrades, monster drops, consumables, and other pick-ups are completely randomized as well so no two runs are exactly the same. You lose almost all of your upgrades and consumable with every death but there are some upgrades that persist through to the next cycle. However, those are few and far between. Returnal takes this repetitive cycle to heart and weaves this into the overall story. Your character has a certain level of self-awareness of being stuck in a cycle and is trying to unlock the how and why through memories and found scout logs, logs left behind by other versions of herself.

    Housemarque really leans into the neverending cycle theme. There’s an online component to the game where a scout’s death by another player can be downloaded to your game. Every once in a while you’ll come across a deceased scout that you can scan. The scan will replay the last few moments of the scout before its death and show how the scout died. After which you can scavenge the body for loot or avenge its death by fighting an alien monster. A successful avenging will net you Ether, an in-game type of currency. The avenged player will get a notification and receive some sort of pick-up item. This works the same way for you too. Your death will be shared automatically with other players if your settings allow it. And if your death was successfully avenged, you’ll be able to receive a pick-up item upon the start of your next cycle.

    I’ve played and died a LOT but it’s a lot of fun. The fun for me comes from each run where I feel like I’m doing a little better, learn a little bit more, and progress a little further. There’s no leveling up or experience points or anything like that. The closest thing might be gaining proficiency in a weapon the more times you kill an alien monster. But, like most other things, any proficiency gained is lost upon death.

    Aside from the actual game play, for me Returnal exemplifies the power of the PS5. It runs at 4k 60fps with no loading screens. Everything feels buttery smooth and screens and levels load instantly. So many games that were upgraded to a PS5 version offered a performance setting OR a fidelity setting. Why not both at once? The PS5 version of Spider-Man offered a “Performance RT” setting that was the best of both worlds but there were still some sacrifices made to get there. Maybe because those were PS4 games that were more or less ported to a PS5, but Returnal makes no such compromises. I have to assume it’s because it was natively coded for the console. I mean, I haven’t done a technical analysis but this is what it feels like to me. All that and the PS5 doesn’t sound like a jet engine that’s about to take off like my old PS4 Pro did with some games. Top to bottom, Returnal is truly a great experience.

    Runner-Up: Rocket League

    I started playing this only ’cause one of my boys is super into it. Playing soccer with Hot Wheels sounds weird but is pretty damn fun. I’ve more or less retired from Splatoon 2 (until Splatoon 3 comes out) and Rocket League has filled that goto quick-fix game vacancy it left behind. And since I picked Splatoon 2 as my Game of the Year for 2017 partially because of the number of hours I’ve put in to it, I have to be fair and give Rocket League a nod in this post because I play it almost every day. I’m not very good but every once in a blue moon, I’ll make a play like this and feel like a pro, if even for just a moment:

    Pretty damn fun.

    Board Games?

    Yeah, I don’t have much to contribute for this genre. I received a couple of Kickstarters that I backed, but I haven’t played any of them. Sadly, some are still unopened in their shipping box.

    Eric’s Picks

    This is always my favorite post to write each year, because honestly I forget about most of the games I’ve played.

    This year was pretty big for me, because I got a PS5 (thanks to Ace’s quick fingers). This opened up a whole new world of gaming, including Demon’s Souls, a new / old Souls game for me to enjoy. While a majority of the games I played this year were on PC, the games I got on my PS5, I greatly enjoyed. I won’t bore you with the details, but I’ll break down my favorites of the year below. Keep in mind: these are my favorite that I played this year, not necessarily games from 2021.

    Slay the Spire

    This one came out in…2017. So I’m a bit late to the party, but thanks to Xbox Game Pass Streaming, I was able to experience this game with touch controls from the comfort of my bed while watching documentaries. Slay the Spire is the perfect tune-out game. It demands enough attention to not be boring, but the game is set to your pace. Want to take things slow? Blast through it? Take a five minute break mid-battle? Slay the Spire doesn’t care.

    It’s the first deck building game I’ve ever played, and wow, I am now a huge fan of the genre. The amount of different builds and skills you can focus within each character is truly astounding. For instance, take my favorite character: The Silent. You could focus a poison-heavy build, slowly killing enemies while building up a tanky defense to outlast them. Or a throwing knife build, where you can not only boost the power of cheap throwing knife cards, but also really up the amount you get, so you can take down bosses in one or two turns. Or put everything on the power of discarding and drawing cards, so you can select the specific cards you want each turn. There’s so many variations that come with including just one or two new cards. Add in relics that permanently boost your abilities, or potions that give you temporary abilities, and ways to manipulate all of those, and you’re in for a good time.

    Another note: this game is tough. It took me a long time to beat it, even longer to beat it with every character. It’s a standard roguelike, so if you’re not into that gameplay loop, well, you might not like deck building games at all. It can also be kinda daunting to dip into if you’re looking to relax. While I’d say the game is relaxing, it can still be pretty stressful sometimes, and usually requires a fair bit of thinking.

    Dominion

    Keeping with the deck building theme is Dominion. Dominion is actually a card game, but luckily for humanity, it has a free-to-play digital version both on Steam and on browser. Let me say first and foremost: do not play this game physically. There is so much shuffling and so many rules that without automation, you’re in for a bad time.

    Anyway, with that out of the way, let me tell you how Dominion blows Slay the Spire out of the water.

    First of all, you’re playing the game against another human opponent, which adds a bunch of death. Your strategy will change because of that. While your goal is simply to have more points than your opponent, there are so many ways to do that, and it can change as you watch their move and slowly build a mental image of their deck.

    Second, every single game is different (as long as you have all the expansions, and you must have the expansions). With only ten action cards each game, the small variations that arise from the pairing of different cards can completely change everything. I think I read a stat somewhere that if you started a new game of Dominion every minute, it would take around 63 million years to see every single possible match of 10 cards.

    Third, there’s no right way to play the game. Dominion simply gives you ten cards and says “well, whatcha got?” Do you want to go with a really tight deck with cards that build your currency? Or pull off ludacrious combos until you have 15 different cards in play each turn? Dominion forces you to be creative, and unlike Slay the Spire, games are usually so quick that even if a strategy doesn’t work, it won’t be long until you have a fresh start, and that strategy is completely irrelevant. It’s impossible to go into this game with strategies, because every game is different. You just have to know how to chain together what you’re given well enough to win.

    I could go on and on, but if you like deck building games, give it a try. It’s free. And then do what I did and spent $150 on the expansion packs. And never regret a thing.

    Bowser’s Fury

    The only bad thing I can say about Bowser’s Fury is that I keep forgetting it’s my game of the year. It’s not a very long game. It took me around 5 hours to 100% it, so maybe that’s why. I’d call it DLC for Super Mario 3D World if it wasn’t so very different, and wasn’t so much better.

    Bowser’s Fury is much more of a fusion of Super Mario 3D World and Super Mario Odyssey than a pure successor to either. While the moveset, powerups, and enemies are all taken from 3D World, the gameplay loop of grabbing Cat Shines after completing a series of platforming challenges comes right out of Odyssey.

    And, of course, Bowser’s Fury bring two new, important things to the table. First, everything is in one level. There’s no level select, no flagpoles, nothing to separate the various platforming challenges from each other aside from literal geographic separation. What you get, especially towards the end of the game, is a masterful blending of using the levels as a highway to move from one place to another. Cat Shines are hidden all over the place, sometimes behind rock pillars, or high up in the sky, or behind some specific blocks. So the stages are recontextualized depending on the challenge you’re seeking.

    The stages also brilliantly change whenever you leave them. Each stage has 5 different “levels”, usually focused on a central mechanic: flipping platforms, the propellor cap, the ice skate. And after you beat a stage and walk off to do something else, it will seamlessly transition into another challenge. If I can say one bad thing about Odyssey, which remains my favorite Mario game to this day, sometimes you can be walking around too much, looking for a moon without really knowing where you’re going. That problem is gone in Bowser’s Fury. It is always obvious where you need to go, you just need to get there.

    Bowser’s Fury also adds, well, Bowser. And his fury. The entire game orbits Bowser, who has transformed into this kaiju-like beast. Most of the game, Bowser is slumbering in the center of the map, but every few minutes he will wake up and the entire game will change.

    He breathes fire, create new platforms to make some challenges easier, and can blow up special “Bowser Blocks” to reveal Cat Shines. Again, it’s another recontextualization of the stages. Because the only way to get Bowser back to sleep (aside from beating him up, but we’ll get to that), is by collecting a Cat Shine. So it’s generally in your best interest, unless you like getting lit on fire, to grab one as quickly as you can. If you don’t grab a Cat Shine, Bowser will eventually go back to sleep, which I’ll admit isn’t my favorite design choice. Especially in the late game, when you need him to blow up a series of Bowser Blocks in a row. It can be a bit frustrating to wait on him, but it’s a small nitpick.

    Another form of recontextualizing (my new favorite word, apparently), comes with the BIG BELL. I don’t know if that’s the official term, but it’s what I call it. After you’ve collected a few Cat Shines, you’ll unlock a giant bell that will turn you into a giant Kaiju. Then, you deck it out with Bowser on the map. The stages now become obstacles, to stop Bowser’s fire or his rolling attack. It’s brilliant, and, unlike previous Mario games with a big Mario Bros. (looking at you, Mario and Luigi: Dream Team), it’s actually genuinely fun.

    Fun is a great word to describe this game. The momentum of moving from one place to the next is so good, and it never stops. I felt a dopamine rush throughout the entire game, until the credits rolled at the end. While, yes, this game is short, it makes me extremely excited for the future of Mario games. The lesson learned in Bowser’s Fury will surely be used in the next Mario game, and I can’t wait to see what we get.

    Nick’s Picks

    Yeah, so, Eric asked me about this a few weeks ago, and I thought long and hard about this. Not about what my favorite game of 2021 was, but about what new video games I actually played in 2021. So here’s the complete list of video games that were released in 2021 that I played this year:

    • Mass Effect Legendary Edition
    • Call of Duty: Vanguard
    • Valheim
    • Forza Horizon 5*

    I’ve played exactly 14 minutes of Forza Horizon 5 thus far – short review, it’s a Forza game. Mass Effect Legendary Edition is a re-release of a game trilogy I’ve played dozens of times – your opinion of Mass Effect is set, and I’m not going to give any more credit to “Bioware Magic” (i.e, Crunch). CoD is a guilty pleasure from a company that deserves to die in a fire and I seriously hate that I enjoy the fundamental gameplay loop of so much. I’m not going to recognize them with anything because Activision|Blizzard is a gross company that the world would probably be better off without and Bobby Kotick is a billionaire, and the world would certainly be better off without all billionaires. All of them.

    Valheim

    That leaves Valheim as the Video Game that I spent a decent chunk of time with… it’s a survival sandbox builder game that’s got some inspiration from Minecraft in it. It’s an odd game for me to like in a way, as I don’t like Minecraft all that much (though I need to get over that, since it’s my daughters absolute favorite game), and I’m not big into survival games. That being said, it’s a builder, and it scratched an itch that the long-dead EverQuest Landmark did, and it can be modded and allows for private servers.

    Plus, it’s an indie title, and the developer has a “no crunch” policy, and despite hitting the jackpot with their title (five million sales on Steam after it’s launch – it’s a PC-only title), they haven’t turned it into a microtransaction-laden monster title. They deserve support and success.

    Warhammer 40k

    That’s not to say I didn’t spend a lot of time this year not gaming… it’s just that most of my time gaming wasn’t spent in front of a computer. I mean, I did plenty of that, just playing the same old stuff I always do. Instead, I spent a lot of time at my local friendly game store instead, pushing little plastic models around in big pretend battles.

    This is most of my Crusade Army right now, and it’s been going strong for awhile

    We kicked off a Crusade league here, which is a new way to play with 9th edition, and has quickly spread out to the other games in the form of “Narrative” play. Basically, instead of straight-up competitive play, you’re doing more of a story-based, game-to-game system that’s about building up over time. I opted to start with my Blood Angels force, and kept working on them over the course of the year.

    My Blood Angels aren’t the strongest army in the game. Certainly not the worst… that’s reserved for my second army, Craftworlds Eldar (who volley for that title with the Tau), but they’re an early-edition Codex that lacks a lot of synergy with the rules. Power Creep has been a big thing this edition, and there has been some real balance issues with books released after the initial batch. Worse, the actual rules for the Blood Angels, while flavorful, don’t really match the lore and what the army is supposedly good at.

    In theory, we’re a close-combat army that likes jet packs. We do have some troops that can do both of those things, but there are generic Space Marine troops that do it better than them, and there are other armies that do it better than them as well. Other armies have better rules than us to do those things as well, and our rules don’t really support it.

    It’s frustrating that this is probably the best face I’ve ever painted, on a unit I may never field…

    Still, it was a fun way to meet a lot of new people, enjoy playing games masked, and for a brief time pre-Delta and Omicron, unmasked, amongst mostly-vaxxed players (I mean, you got some idiots in every group), and I’ve found a good community of players in Warhammer for the first time in years. That’s the big thing for games like this… the community makes it far more than the game does, and the reason why I’d quit playing it in the past was because the community where I’d lived was just so bad.

    It’s not all perfect, though… Games Workshop, as a company, has certainly seen their share of highs and lows. They continue to do rather epic levels of shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to communication and marketing. The debacle around Cursed City is still a master class on everything not to do… they just recently announced that the game is coming back without any sort of explanation as to why they scrubbed it from their site and went radio silent. No date as to when, but it will be getting expansions, so… yay, I guess?

    More recently, an issue of their magazine that was supposed to show up before Christmas has just… vanished. It was supposed to have new rules for a couple of different armies in Age of Sigmar (the fantasy game), as well as some other stuff… and just nothing. They continue to have issues with product delays and the pipeline, and they’re just drip-feeding out information. Prices have gone up, and product has been increasingly hard to find, both at local game stores and directly from GW. Their ability to fulfill orders laughable most of the time, with stuff often taking weeks or months to show up.

    I had to 3D print one small part in here, because I can’t order them from GW directly. They’ve been out of stock for ages…

    That being said, they’re still the wargames that I find most fun to play. There are plenty of competitors out there, but none of them scratch that same itch. Legion has a decent enough following around here, but I haven’t gotten into it and don’t have the time to paint it. Fallout Wasteland Warfare, while fun, has no community to speak of in this area (or anywhere so far as I know – cool looking minis, but it hasn’t ever taken off). I’m not really interested in the rank-and-flank style games like Conquest.

    I have started to get more into the smaller games from GW, though, and those likely will be what I talk about next year. Things like Necromunda, which I last played back in the late 90s, Kill Team, which saw a new edition come out this year. I’m going to start dipping my toes into Age of Sigmar, because I always want a bit more fantasy, though Im likely going to avoid Warcry and the like. There’s plenty of tabletop, and painting and building has been my jam as of late.

    It hasn’t been just my Blood Angels… my Craftworlds army has been out there and dying a lot. Like thia scene, right before my Fire Prism got wrecked

    I’ve also done some D&D, though that’s also been a bit more scattered as the pandemic year has moved it all online and my group has sort of scattered to the wind as people have moved around in the 24th month of 2020. Hopefully I’ll get some of that going again as we go into 2020 Part III, but I’m also taking a long and hard look at my shelves full of RPG books, and realizing that most of these books and systems are going unread and unused, and probably need to be cut as well.

    I wrote about my adventures in doing too many things earlier this year, dealing with anxiety and mental health, and just the world being a general tire fire. All of that is still true. I’ve continued down that path, as it’s a journey, not a goal. I’ve managed to get rid of some piles of plastic, gotten different piles of plastic, and generally maintained. I did find someone to buy my copy of Gloomhaven, though somehow my board game collection still managed to grow as old Kickstarter pledges started to show up (as did Heroquest, which just took up Gloomhaven’s space in the the closet). So, kind of a wash.

    Still, though, it was really a Warhammer year for me. Who knows, maybe Space Marine II will come out in 2022 (though it has no date announced, so who knows)… and it can scratch both my Warhammer and video game itches. The first game was one of the few 40k games that I’ve ever actually enjoyed, and even though it was janky and somewhat one-note, it was fun and underrated.

  • Burnout, Anxiety, FOMO, and Trying to Deal with Life

    Burnout, Anxiety, FOMO, and Trying to Deal with Life

    Recently, I’ve been dealing with a huge malaise around… honestly, everything. I haven’t contributed much to the site, my hobbies are sitting on the shelf, and the various piles of shame of unfinished and unplayed things continues to grow. I work, spend time with family, mess around on my computer for a bit, go to sleep… rinse, repeat.

    It’d be easy to just say that that I’m in a rut, but I know that’s not true. It’s far past time that I need to be honest with myself and start to look at why I feel like I’m trapped in mud, and can move just enough to realize it’s going to be hard to get out so I don’t bother. There is a lot of mental health issues, anxiety, and problems that have been pushed to the back for a long time that may have managed to get me finally, and my choices are pretty much at give up or try to do something.

    Prior to 2020 and 2021, it was a lot easier for a lot of us to keep ignoring or running from problems like this. But the pandemic sort of grabbed us all and locked us in our houses with all the demons we’d been trying so hard to ignore. Our choices have been reduced to give up or maybe deal with them (or I suppose try harder to ignore, but that’s not really a sustainable choice).

    Ultimately, though, we all have to face them. When you deal with anxiety and depression, the world right now isn’t exactly the best sort of place. Throw on to that being a parent, with two kids who are too young to get the COVID vaccine in a country full of assholes who are refusing to get vaccinated and putting them at risk. If you are a person who is is able to get vaccinated and still refusing, I sincerely hope you cease to exist before you can hurt anyone else. All of society and humanity will be better with you gone and forgotten. Please, feel free to never read this site again and go away forever.

    Not kidding on this in any way, shape, or form

    Shockingly, that does have something to do with this article, though. I’m talking about anxiety, and people like that are who have been dragging out the nightmare we’ve all been drug through for the past starting-to-push-two-years now. It’s hard to find enjoyment when we we’ve seen just how awful so many of the people in our world are, how awful so many of the companies behind the products we like can be, and how predatory so many of the things we enjoy are at their base.

    Also, I maybe be dealing with some anger issues.

    I’ve been churning this article over for months at this point, in a whole lot of variations. It was talking about how I have too many hobbies (I absolutely do), how companies are ripping apart their own properties and brands with FOMO (they certainly are), how I’m in a gaming slump (I am)… and really, it all is just swirling around the same general problem. Maybe I’m oversharing, but I think that I’m not the only one that’s dealing with a lot of these things and maybe it would be worth writing about. Or maybe I just want to rant for a bit in a bit of catharsis, because that’s always fun.

    Let me be very clear with something – there should be no shame about acknowledging and taking care of our mental health. Our society has long just pretended that problems like anxiety and depression are failures on the part of the person, or weaknesses, and that’s led to untold damage. I mean, I fully believe and encourage that, but I’m also just now starting to deal with these problems that I have clearly ignored for decades at this point. It’s hard, so incredibly hard, to move past exactly how messed up we’ve all been by our cultures and society in general (and for some, our families and backgrounds).

    So I’m going to break down and walk through the various hobbies and things that I’ve long held close, said I’ve cared about, or put as part of my identity… and have recently started to question or examine. Mostly because, strangely, they are often the cause of some of my anxiety (though certainly not all), as well as my release for it.

    Video Games

    A couple of months back, I made a post in a Facebook Group I belong to wondering, honestly, if I just don’t care about Video Games anymore. My overall time available to play games has been shrinking over the years… a consequence of getting older, having kids, a career, marriage, and just other things to do.

    That’s 336 hours, or 14 full days of my life, spent playing Call of Duty: Cold War. And this is just on Xbox… I own it on PC as well, and have logged 250 hours (10+ days) there as well

    It used to be that I’d get excited for a game, play it for a few days before life would distract me and never finish it. But in the past year or so, that changed. I wasn’t buying and playing for a bit… I was either buying and never playing, or just never even buying. I’d be hard pressed to talk about the last time I was just over-the-moon excited for a game. There are times that I’d be thrilled at an announcement or trailer and it die off (looking at you, Avengers)… but this was different. Stuff that I know should be right up my alley wasn’t doing anything for me at all.

    Case in point, the Mass Effect Legendary Edition. I’ve talked, many times, about the series. That game is full-stop my favorite series, and the games are all high on my list of favorites of all time. Mass Effect 2 is quite possibly my favorite, and at least in the top 3 somewhere (Zelda: A Link to the Past and Final Fantasy VI would be the other two, if you were curious). I’ve played it a couple of times a year since it came out, often bringing in the others for good measure… but 2 is just a perfect slice of a game.

    Yes, it’s a remake, so that takes a bit of the shine off… but still getting it on new platforms and combined together, that’s a big something. The games are showing their age, and even at the full $60 price of games, they’re well worth it in my book. Yet… I didn’t get it when it came out. I waited a couple of weeks, and thought I had time to play. I got it, installed it… and then didn’t do anything with it. I didn’t end up playing it until last week, and got as far as becoming a Spectre and haven’t picked it up since that weekend.

    I don’t know that I can even blame it on the fact that EA is a trash company that exemplifies the worst parts of capitalism. Honestly, pretty much all major companies (and certainly all major game companies) at this point, and when it comes to my outrage meter these days, I only have so much rage to spread around. I still hate how gross and exploitative the companies that control video games are, their business models, and how they purposefully make games unfun to sell things to fix problems they created. But if I’m ranking things that really set me off, companies that condone and enable the actual rape of their workers get more of my anger these days. Bioware magic was a lie we were sold that was just crunch to line the pockets of millionaires and billionaires at the expense of people who love what they do.

    This has nothing to do with the article… I just got a new TV today and was having fun playing in 4K for the first time ever.

    Everything I love is tied up in companies like that, and I have to make some level of peace with the fact that none of them are all that great. I won’t ever stop railing against them, and the crappy stuff they do… but that’s the world we live in. I mean, this is a site dedicated to Star Wars in large part, and Disney certainly makes it hard to be a fan frequently. So does LEGO, and LucasArts, and everyone else. If you can look at a property or fandom you love and can’t see a place where it let you down, I both pity and envy you. Because you’re deluding yourself and I sometimes honestly wish i could do that as well.

    When I sat down and thought about how I feel, and how it doesn’t seem like the normal gaming ruts I’ve hit in the past, I had a realization. I’m honestly just a fan of too many things, and have vastly too many hobbies for the time I have available. Video Games, LEGO (even in a limited amount that I do), writing, D&D, Warhammer, Board Games, Magic the Gathering, and other tabletop war games are all competing for the same dollars and the same increasingly shrinking slice of time. I’ve overextended myself in the things I do for fun… and it’s in turn made all of them not fun.

    I’ve honestly stopped even looking at my “backlog” of games to play… I used to dream of the time when I’d have a whole bunch of time to get on there and play as I got older and could do more. Spoiler for all of the younger people reading this article that haven’t checked out because there are a lot of words and it’s basically “old man yells at cloud” in article form - life does not work this way.

    And just think, this count is in purchasing one game on Steam in the past year or so

    I’m married, I’ve got kids, a full time professional job, responsibilities, and just things to do. TV always lied to us, with shows about friends all hanging out together and looking bored in their 30s. Even one of those things is a lot… have a professional job? You likely have to work on skills and keep up with things in your off hours. Have a significant other? They like it when you invest some of your time with them, and that only gets harder later on (and, again, spoiler warning… it never gets more easy or natural; if anything, it gets harder over the course of your relationship). Single? You probably have friendships, and healthy friendships need to be cared for too. There are things to do around your house or apartment, meals to prep and care for, just going back and forth to work, running errands, etc.

    It all adds up… a thousand little tiny things you don’t think about. It never decreases, and for me, that’s culminated in me going through m day, getting home, and eventually just sitting down and playing through the exact same game or two that I always have, because it’s easy, comforting, and familiar. Or sometimes, I just do nothing. I keep having to tell myself that, honestly, both of those things are okay. I’m under no obligation to play anything I don’t want to. That’s my time, my enjoyment, and how I choose to spend it is my business. I don’t need to play new things, or even really the old things. Sure, I wish I would have spent a whole lot less money on the old things, but that ship has sailed.

    For the record, I looked it up… the last “new” game that I outright purchased, was Mass Effect Legendary Edition. Any other “purchases” since that time have just been my free game claims with Xbox Live or PS Plus (which I really need to cancel). All of my various game libraries have hundreds of games in them, and they only seem to be growing… but the reality is that my time playing through those libraries is long gone. And I’m not sure it’s ever going to come back.

    Tabletop

    My love of video games is older than my love of playing games around the tabletop… but I’d say my love of pen and paper games, or tabletop wargames, runs a whole lot deeper. That made for a very nerdy younger me… player of Magic the Gathering, Dungeon & Dragons, and Warhammer. Growing up in the midwest that did not make a whole lot of friends. Being a choir, band, etc., didn’t exactly help either – but my parents wouldn’t let me ever go out for sports because they didn’t want to pay for insurance. Things like that may give a clue to where some of my anger and anxiety issues come from…

    Why is the & in Tasha’s Cauldron offset compared to every other book?

    Board games, weirdly, were never a big thing for me. They weren’t in the cultural zeitgeist at all back when I was a kid, not even at the fringes at my local game stores. Those didn’t really hit en masse until the early 2000s, when I was leaving college and entering the real world, so it sort of passed me by. I just never had a group that played them in my circle of friends, so as much as I wanted to when i saw them, I never had a chance to.

    I’ve mostly got stories of fun memories and some heaping piles of regret from those days. Of course, like so many others, I owned a lot of things that it turns out are really hard or expensive to replace now if I want them. Magic the Gathering, for example, has gotten stupid expensive. I never had any of the Power Nine, but I had a lot of other cards that are on the reserve list now, including, at one point, 3 full sets of revised Dual Lands (that’s 4 of each Dual Land, and there are ten total… so I had 120 of them). For those not who don’t follow the finance side, those cards would be worth about $15k or so today, minimum. I think I sold them for about $30 each, to pay for books one semester.

    Logically, I know that it was likely the right call, even though it hurts. I don’t use my college degree for anything, it was very expensive, but it was crucial for putting me on the path where I am now. It got me in the door, ultimately, for the career where I am now fairly successful and skilled. And it put me in a place where I met the only person I “went” to college with (we never had a class together, and actually met at work) that I still talk to – my wife. So, you know, a win.

    Bigger regrets, though, are ones I have no real control over. Like my nearly complete collection of D&D Planescape boxed sets and books. They were stolen out of a storage locker (along with my dice, some golf clubs, and a few other things) in college. Those are exceptionally hard to get, and very expensive to buy, so not something I’m ever likely to have again.

    Birthright and Al-Qadim were favorites of mine, along with Planescape. I’ve actually managed to replace about 90% of the Birthright stuff (it’s not all here), but the rest are more situational. Al-Qadim and Maztica both are a weird mix of progressive and super problematic in that 90s D&D way…

    That’s just old stuff, though. In today’s world, old stuff is easy to work with, because it’s not like it’s going anywhere. Sometimes you see an eBay deal and that’s something you jump on… the worse thing you get is a bit of buyer’s remorse. Far more sinister is the constant bombardment of new products and things in the tabletop space. All of the mainline game makers are putting out products all the time… Dungeons & Dragons has three books coming out between now and the end of the year. I think I have one being delivered today (as I’m writing this, anyway), and I don’t even remember which one it is.

    I have to come to terms with some of this being FOMO rearing it’s ugly head; we all love to talk about fighting FOMO and not being subject to the predatory marketing and pushing fandoms. We also all know that’s complete bullshit; none of us… none of us, are immune to these pressures. That’s why they work so well. It doesn’t matter how smart we are, how evolved we think our brains are, or anything like that. We’re still humans our our brains fail and trick us all the time. That’s why I feel the urge right now to go and buy some packs of Magic the Gathering and open them, even though I don’t need the contents for anything really… because my stupid monkey brain is wired to see that reward surge of opening fun and forgets the fact that most packs are full of things that have no value for me (to use, to sell, or to trade).

    These are just the rares and commander decks that I have around. I’m slowly working through getting rid of them and cutting down to just a few things to keep around.

    All of the companies have been ramping up their releases, competing for our hobby dollars, demanding more and more, going bigger and bigger, hitting the FOMO harder and harder. I was enjoying getting back into physical Magic the Gathering, but it’s honestly just too much with their constant barrage of physical products. Collector’s Packs, Set Boosters, variations of cards, box toppers, Commander Decks, limited sets, Mystery Boosters and The List, Secret Lairs. At the same time, they wrap them in artificial scarcity, screw with local stores and allocations, and use that to just ramp up the FOMO that much more. This leads to frustration, and volatility, with players and the market in trying to get singles and cards.

    This all ties into the mental health issues that I’ve been trying to come to terms with because I’ve come to realize that there’s clearly a link between how I deal with stress and anxiety and me spending vastly too much on these hobbies and things. I pick up more hobbies than I have any chance of ever doing or completing, building up hobby debt (both as monetary debt and things to get done), and that builds the anxiety, which I need to take care of so I go buy more things to try and take care of it. It’s a cycle that I’ve been perpetuating most of my adult life, I think, and it’s getting to the point where it feels like it’s ripping me apart.

    It’s even worse with some companies, that have seemingly been able to weaponize their incompetence and exploit all of the various problems that have cropped up in the pandemic. Shipping slowdowns, product shortages, scarcity… they’ve been able to just turn on that. Games Workshop is just such a company, makers of Warhammer 40k, Age of Sigmar, and angry fans everywhere.

    FOMO gets me more often than I like to admit… though it’s also a problem that my ambitions almost always vastly outstrip my abilities and available time

    Fun story for those who don’t follow them, and how it works… in the spring, they had a huge build-up to a new product – Warhammer Quest: Cursed City. It’s a board-game style set with a whole lot of cool new miniatures in it. It can be played single player, the figures can be used in Age of Sigmar, and most won’t be released elsewhere for awhile (if at all). The last WQ-spinoff game, Blackstone Fortress, was very popular and had a lot of cool minis in it. It’s still available, though not exactly easy to get, and came out back in 2018. The new game looked to be it’s replacement, a shift back into Fantasy (Blackstone was a 40k game), and was going to be available long-term… mostly because that’s what Games Workshop implied heavily, and even said a couple of times in their tweets.

    There were posts, pages, marketing blasts, kits sent to YouTube creators, multiple months of build-up on Warhammer Community and White Dwarf, GW’s in-house magazine. And then the game went up for pre-order when the FOMO fires were at their hottest… and sold out in about 15 minutes. Then never came back in stock. Turns out, what was implied to be an evergreen product was a limited release product that GW then went completely radio-silent on. To this day, they’ve made exactly zero tweets, announcements, or press releases on the game. They scrubbed it from their website, and only have the rule supplements up and available. it will get no further support or information. If you happened to have gotten one (full disclosure, I did, I had it ordered through my FLGS), you were the lucky ones.

    It’s mind-boggling how they’ve managed to weaponize their own incompetence and inability to handle product. 2020/2021 and the ongoing pandemic caused by the idiocy of our fellow humans, and the disruptions around the globe from shipping and workers realizing their horribly underpaid for the work they do… and GW isn’t alone in being messed up by it. What’s unfortunate is that they, like so many others, continue to press the same FOMO buttons, and press the same things, that just make you want a product so bad. They know full well they aren’t going to be deliver, and that they’re going to piss off a lot of people in doing it. But they keep doing it, again and again.

    I’ve got like 3 or 4 boxes like this, just small terrain parts sitting around, that I need to paint. And I don’t even have a wargame board at my house… yet

    Months down the road… that Cursed City box I bought is still sitting in a closet, still in its shrink wrap. Even though it was hard to get, it angered a lot of people, and it’s never taken off in popularity. The models that come in the box aren’t powerful in the main game, Age of Sigmar, so they’ve never commanded a price premium. The game itself hovers in value right around its MSRP, $200, and most people who have a box and are looking to get rid of it… just can’t. I don’t know what I’m going to do with mine.

    Maybe I’ll open it, build, and paint the miniatures one day… but I kind of doubt it. They look really amazing, I won’t lie. But I’ve got hundreds and hundreds of other minis waiting to be painted that I care about more. One thing I know for certain… I’m never going to play the game. That’s what a lot of this journey has been about, really… I’m not going to play any of the games. I’ve got tons of board games and the like I’m never going to play.

    I think they look great, or have cool things, and I really wish I could play them, but in my 40s, it’s not like the time and group of friends will magically spring into being for that to happen. My friends all have kids and lives, and getting us all together is hard in the best of times. Throwing a new game into the mix is effectively impossible. None of us really care enough about boardgames to play it, and I don’t care enough about them to play it alone. That’s hours of my life I’d rather put into other things, or wasting it playing video games, reading, or writing articles like this.

    This is my hobby cart… or part of it at least. It’s next to my desk, and full of models and supplies that I’m using all the time.

    So maybe it’s time to just… stop trying to chase that dream. That’s the hardest lesson I’m trying to learn in this journey. The one that I know, and understand, but cannot often accept. That I’ve got so many hobbies, but will never have the time for them. So maybe it’s time to give that dream up. More importantly, though… there’s nothing wrong with that, ultimately. Not all of our dreams come true… hell, almost none of our dreams come true. And that’s okay.

    Remember being asked as a kid, “what do you want to be when you grow up,” or being asked in school or college, “what do you want to do after you graduate”? I rarely had a great answer. When I was a lot younger, I wanted to be an astronaut, but that was never an achievable goal. When I started college, I wanted to make video games, but then I started to take the computer science courses my school offered, and hated them (they were not suited for games anyway)… so I decided to go other directions. Given how terrible the game industry is, I dodged a bullet.

    Really, though, I never had much of a plan past “I want to be able to provide for myself and my family” and “I want the security I never had growing up.” Yeah, I had a lot of other things I’d like to do, or things I enjoyed… but no real long term passions or goals. I still don’t. I’ve never thought that was a bad thing, and not sure I think it’s a bad thing, but I am starting to realize that maybe a lot of that lack of planning is why things are piling up that I’d like to try.

    I honestly don’t even remember buying this Robotech board game. Why did I buy it? I liked Robotech… in the 80s; in fact, it’s one of the few anime shows I actually like. But I don’t think I like it enough to actually own something from it.

    So… it’s time for me to say goodbye to board games and the like, overall. I’ll keep my Zombicide games, because there are a whole ton of minis that I want to paint in them, I can use them in D&D and tabletop (that’s why I got them in the first place, actually)… but I’m likely going to get rid of a lot of them. Gloomhaven may be the best game made in the past couple of decades, but I’m never going to get to play it. And it sitting there, taking up space, not being used, is a hobby debt that just adds to my anxiety. I’m tired of seeing the latest thing, which looks awesome, deciding to chase it, and then wondering why I did it when stuff like the Resident Evil 3 board game shows up on my doorstep. I don’t even like the Resident Evil video game series… why did I think I’d like the board game?

    Really, the stuff that I have been sticking to in all of this has been Warhammer and D&D (or Pen & Paper) – things that have a social and friend group component that I found I was longing for. That put me around a table to have fun and talk to people. So those are what I’m going to keep doing. I like painting, I like writing my campaign world… and they can be a healthy thing when I’m not building up mountains of plastic to build and paint.

    LEGO, Star Wars, and Nerdy Stuff

    It’s no secret that I haven’t exactly been into LEGO in recent years. I’ve written about it before on here – in truth, none of us on the site are deeply into it anymore. For me, honestly, it’s become sort of a cold detachment. My kids like LEGO, but neither of them really love them. They’re not running up and down the aisles begging for different sets. My daughter loves getting them, but she’s never asked for a specific one that she wants. My son just loves whatever his sister is playing with.

    This is every LEGO set that I have on display in my house. Also my Xbox Series X controller. It’s blue, and out of reach of my kids.

    I’ve bought four sets for myself in the past 12 months: the Saturn V rocket, the ISS, the Space Shuttle Discovery, and the Nintendo Entertainment System. I’ve only opened and built two of them, Discovery and the ISS. Ostensibly, I was going to write reviews for them here… I still might, but just never get around to it. Both just sit on the shelf, on display. I like the space sets, and my daughter loves space stuff, so they make for a good thing to have and talk about. I’ve never opened the Saturn V, because I don’t know where I’d put it.

    The NES is a weirder set… it looks great, and it looks fun, but I just don’t feel like opening and building it. It doesn’t matter how many people tell me how much fun it is, how often I look at it… I just don’t feel like it. I honestly feel nothing. That’s what I get when I look at most LEGO anymore. There’s a tiny little flicker of building of “oh, that’s fun” and then it’s gone. It goes on a shelf or goes to my kids when it’s done. I can review them, but I feel no passion at all for it.

    The heading of this said Star Wars and Sci-Fi though… what does LEGO have to do with that? Well, I’m going to let you in on another shameful secret of mine: I’ve never finished watching Loki. I’ve watched the first two episodes, and enjoyed them, but never bothered to watch the rest. I feel exactly the same way with that show as I do with LEGO. I can’t even explain what it is… to enjoy something in the moment but not really care or not care about it past that. Something that I genuinely love but then move on from. There isn’t any anticipation or excitement for what’s coming up.

    I’ve stopped watching any teasers or trailers for upcoming movies or TV shows, because they just didn’t excite me at all (and, honestly, I also felt like going in unprepared more). That’s part of why I haven’t posted any of them here when they come up… because I’ve stopped keeping track of anything like that. I’m not going to a movie theater anytime soon, but even when I’m at home I’m not really watching stuff.

    I’ve been working on this article for like… two months, and in that entire time, never finished Loki

    I can’t even describe why most of the time… that general feeling of malaise that 2020/2021 has just rubbed all over us is part of it. I haven’t watched What If?, or Black Widow, or any other Marvel movies. I’ve been watching Lower Decks, but I haven’t watched the new Star Wars cartoon and never got around to watching Bad Batch.

    In some ways, it all feels like it comes around back to FOMO again, because everything comes back to FOMO. Nearly everything in our life is marketed that we have to watch it now or we’ll miss out, experience it now or it’s missing, or see it now or it’s gone. The internet and spoilers being everywhere make it almost impossible to watch anything and be surprised unless you watch it the moment it drops – we had a major twist of Brooklyn-Nine-Nine spoiled in the FBTB Discord because someone thoughtlessly just threw out a plot point within an hour of the last episode dropping.

    I guess it all just gets tiresome, this idea that if you don’t consume something immediately, you miss it forever. When the truth is, it almost never works like that. In fact, we’re almost always worse off when we treat everything like that.

    What Does It All mean?

    It’s hard to come to this realization. In the back of my mind, there’s something that clings to these things, these goals, these aspirations. The logical part of my brain knows it’s right to move on… that it’s not giving up, it’s being realistic. There’s a simple calculus at work here in all of this… I’ve got a finite amount of time to give to the hobbies that I enjoy and love, and by overextending like this I’m not able to enjoy any of them. Yet there’s that little hope, that I could. That flicker of enjoyment in having a thing, even though I know it’s fleeting, and more often than not, it’s just regret at having spent money on something I know I’m not going to use anytime soon.

    I suppose that’s what this very long and wordy article is all about, writing and trying to articulate what it’s like when you turn all the focus inside and realize maybe you don’t like a lot of the things you’ve been telling yourself you like for so long. I used to think it was just that I was getting older, or I was busy, but maybe it was something deeper and I was just using these as a defense mechanism. Maybe it’s all of those things. I don’t know.

    For me, things usually work something like this. I see something, think it looks really cool and want it. There’s a part of the hype machine whipping it up that you have to buy this right now it’s so cool, but also this other artificial part that if I don’t buy it right now, it’s only going to get so much more expensive to try and get later when you have a use for it and have time to do something with it. The worst part is that the second part isn’t always imagine… there is an actual cost to “waiting” that’s caused by the artificial scarcity that pretty much every nerdy property relies on to do their business. Toys, tabletop games, collectibles, even some video games… if you wait, it could very well end up being prohibitively expensive to get. Or it may be really cheap because no one ended up wanting it. It’s just a gamble.

    Typically, this leaves me getting something, it going on a shelf, and me ultimately regretting it… especially when my card statement or something comes and now I need to pay for it or the balance has crept up higher yet again. Maybe I’ll try to get rid of it, and probably never recoup what I spent. Maybe I’ll just hang on to it, and I’ll take up more storage space that I don’t have. Maybe I’ll actually put it together, or start to put it together… maybe I’ll just toss it. If it’s a video game it’ll get installed and it will sit there, with very little time played, taking space. If it’s a Warhammer model, maybe I’ll glue it together and prime it, then keep wishing I had time to paint it. Magic cards will get put in a sleeve and stuck in a binder. D&D books will get put on a shelf for me to read later. Books go next to it when I have some quiet time to sit down and read them. It just keeps going, and going, and going, and going.

    I’ve talked about a lot of heavy stuff in this article, so I figured I’d follow internet tradition and end it with a picture of a cat. This is Kit Kat, we adopted him in August. He’s almost six months old now, and this is, shockingly, not the weirdest position he’s ever slept in.

    Suffice it to say, I have more things waiting for me to do than I have days or weeks or years left of my life to actually do them. I’m never going to put together all my LEGO sets ever again, and my kids won’t do that either. I’m never going to have a use for all the different Warhammer figures or models. I play Magic the Gathering in a local store once a week at the very best. My D&D group has trouble meeting more than once a month… and we haven’t been able to get a game in since the beginning of May. Logically, I can look at what I really can do and I cannot in any way reconcile it with what I want to do.

    That’s really the problem, it feels… and I’m often left desperately wishing that I could rewire my brain to just be content with everything I’ve got already. Honestly, I wish I could go further and just get rid of so many of the possessions and stuff and things I have. That’s been the dream, lingering in the back of my head for so long… the fantasy of “what would it be like if I just got rid of this all and walked away.” I can’t do it, I’ve never been able to do it, but the more I get, the more I want to do that. I want to sell off my LEGO collection, and a bunch of the miniatures I have and won’t ever paint, the books I’ll never read, the game I won’t play… but that’s just as much work and time that I either don’t have or don’t want to spend.

    Maybe all of this is a way for me to try and figure out is to just lay it out and take stock of everything that I call a hobby right now. I’m not exactly getting any younger, and certainly not getting any more time as my life goes along and my kids get older, so it may be time to just acknowledge that some of these things are going to go away and need to stay away, no matter how cool I think they are and look, or how much I want to do them.

    To a certain point, that’s happened with some things in my life. I’m not actively seeking out a PlayStation 5 at this point. Do I want one? Yes. Do I need one? Absolutely not. Outside of the fact that there’s basically nothing to play on the thing, I don’t even play my PS4 and the games on it. There’s nothing coming out that I’m excited about, and I don’t know that I’ll be making the time anytime soon for the things coming out. Part is that I’ve become so soured with how game companies keep treating their customers and all the predatory things they do with games… even (maybe especially) in the games I like. The trend of season passes, daily challenges, time-limited unlockables, and login rewards are just ways to turn things that are supposed to be relaxing and fun into stress-building work and time commitments. FOMO doesn’t just suck with physical releases, it sucks when they tie it to stuff like that as well.

    I honestly wish I had an answer here, or could say that this is something I had a plan for taking care of for myself so I had wisdom to share. I don’t, and my life is a running example that I don’t have the willpower or impulse control to do it. I mean, the whole idea that willpower is the answer to get over any addictive, compulsive, or drive behavior is nonsense anyway… it’s like trying to train “just hold it” potty training.

    Maybe what we all need is a bit of therapy to get over it…

  • I Got My Terraforming Mars Big Box Kickstarter Today

    I Got My Terraforming Mars Big Box Kickstarter Today

    Almost exactly a year ago, I pledged some money to Terraforming Mars: Big Box + 3D Tiles. I finally received shipment of almost the entire Kickstarter offering today and opened up the box. I can’t tell if I’m more excited about being feature complete for one of the best rated board games (#4 on Boardgamegeek.com) with official components, or for opening all the boxes and putting all the pieces together, or to actually play the game. I am missing one of the expansion sets, Hellas & Elysium, but I have faith Stronghold Games will make things right.

    Yeah, I haven’t played the game yet. I’ve owned the base game for some time now but pandemic and all has kind of put a damper on getting to experience it with friends. Plus, I’m knee deep in Gloomhaven anyway and it’s difficult to willingly not play that when given the chance. But I’ve opened up enough board games to enjoy the process of getting them set up: punching out tokens, sleeving cards, reading rule books, etc. The Terraforming Mars Big Box set ups the ante by including a set of 3D printed tiles and they look gorgeous:

    Image lifted from the unboxing post over at Kickstarter.

    Production samples were used for the photo. Look how great they look! 3D printed tiles for Terraforming Mars isn’t a new concept. Some other Kickstarter projects have come and gone offering the same thing in concept but vary in execution.  But I like keeping everything official as much as possible, so the Big Box project was right up my alley. It’s like mixing LEGO with an off-brand, not something I’d be prone to do.

    Since I was missing one of the expansions, getting everything organized will have to wait for another night. I can’t wait.

  • Pick Up Diet Gloomhaven, Jaws of the Lion, For Cheap

    Pick Up Diet Gloomhaven, Jaws of the Lion, For Cheap

    Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion is like Diet Gloomhaven: all of the flavor, half the calories. If the idea of picking up the 20+ pound box of regular Gloomhaven seems a bit intimidating because of its size and/or its price, then Jaws of the Lion may be the amuse-bouche you should pick up instead. Jaws of the Lion is a strategic RPG co-op board game that is a direct prequel the events of regular Gloomhaven. There are four new characters, new monsters, and simplified game play to make the introduction to the game much more palatable to beginners and newcomers. One of the great things about this though is that the characters introduced Jaws of the Lion is 100% compatible with the original Gloomhaven. Jaws of the Lion can be played in solo mode but it’s most fun with three other friends to join in on the campaign.

    I really like Gloomhaven and haven’t been able to play in over a year due to pandemic reasons. I hosted a session last Saturday in my garage (with full safety precautions, of course) and despite forgetting a few nuanced rules, had a blast. We lost the scenario by 1 hit point which was utterly frustrating but despite that, we all had a great time. I haven’t played Jaws of the Lion yet, but my board game buddies have and they swear by it. You don’t have to believe me when it comes to the quality of the game though. Just check out the rankings on BoardGameGeek.com. Gloomhaven is #1 overall. And Jaws of the Lion? #6 overall.

    Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion is normally $49.99, but can be picked up from Amazon for $36.99 right now, a 26% savings, an absolute bargain considering how many hours of game play you get out of this. If you can’t wait for shipping and would rather pick this up in person, Target carries the game on their shelves and will price match at the register. If you feel like picking up regular Gloomhaven, it’s currently sitting at $112.76 at Amazon, a near 20% discount.

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  • Great Buy 2 Get 1 Free Deal at Amazon, Target

    Great Buy 2 Get 1 Free Deal at Amazon, Target

    Both Amazon and Target are having an awesome Buy 2 Get 1 Free deal across a couple of product categories like books, movies, board games, and video games. You can mix and match across categories too. This is the kind of sale Target usually has every quarter or so, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it started there and Amazon is just trying to match. No matter, because it’s a great deal regardless of which vendor you choose.

    To maximize your savings, you’ll want to pick three similarly priced items since the cheapest item will be free. If you’re looking into increasing the size of your video game backlog, some picks I can recommend would be Spider-Man Game of the Year Edition ($32.49), Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1 + 2 ($33.99), and Star Wars Squadrons ($39.99). Not a bad haul for $80 or so.

    Board games? This is what I’d go with: Gloomhaven Jaws of the Lion (Target $40.99 | Amazon $40.91), Splendor (Target $35.99 | Amazon $32.99). For a third game, of course I have to recommend original flavor Pandemic ($35.99) for multiple reasons from Target. Amazon‘s price is already pretty cheap for it ($23.99 after coupon) so if you’re buying from there I’d add Lord of the Rings: The Card Game ($39.99) instead.

    There are tons of other things that are part of the deal so take a gander over at Amazon and Target. Deals end on Saturday February 13th and in the case of Target are good both in store and online but the online selection is way better and safer obviously.

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  • What We’re Looking Forward To In 2021

    What We’re Looking Forward To In 2021

    If there’s anything that everyone here is looking forward to, it’s got to be a vaccine and maybe, just maybe, the world getting back to normal. That being said, we’re only a few days into 2021 and we’ve already gotten Bean Dad, an attempted coup in the United States, and a multiple numbers of record deaths… so perhaps those hopes are in vain. It hasn’t even been a week yet, you don’t need to spend so much time telling last year to hold your beer, 2021!

    Still, there’s plenty of stuff to look forward to. From Marvel streaming on Disney+ to video games finally showing up on the next generation consoles, there’s stuff coming in 2021 even if it’s hard to remember in the day-to-day. It’s still early, and it’s already been a long year, but hey, we need something to look forward to, right?

    ACE

    I remember a couple of things I was looking forward to last year: getting a PlayStation 5, Metroid Prime 4, and Wonder Woman 1984. Well, I got my PS5 and burned through the only launch title I wanted to play (Miles Morales) in short order. I might pick up Demon’s Souls but other than that, the number of available PS5 games that is pretty low so it’s good time for me to work on my backlog. I don’t have anything on pre-order so this may be the year. As far as Metroid Prime 4, I didn’t expect the game to launch but wanted at least some kind of news or trailer or something, ANYTHING really. I’m chomping at the bit for that one. There’s a rumor that Metroid Prime 1-3 would be released as an HD collection for the Switch. I would love for that to be true. And Wonder Woman was… less than stellar.

    Looking forward to 2021, let’s see here… as far as video games go, I guess I’d still welcome anything Metroid-related. That may just be something that will permanently reside on this sort of list. Returnal on PS5 is coming out near my birthday. Stray is from a studio that I am paying more attention to (Annapurna Interactive). Gran Turismo 7 for PS5 will get me back into that series again. I’m sure there are going to be other games sprinkled about here and there, but those are what immediately come to mind.

    Even Neo knew there’d be a fourth movie.

    Movies are no longer a regular activity for me. It’s just not the same now, you know. They used to be an event, something to put on the calendar, maybe meet up with some friends to go see, you know, something to plan. But now, it’s taken the same role as a streaming tv service. I just kind of get around to it whenever I can. It’s just not the same anymore. I know there are some high profile, big blockbuster movies slated for 2021, but it just doesn’t hold the same draw for me. Matrix 4 might be the only one I half pay attention to when it becomes available.

    For TV, I’m hoping Stranger Things will be on the schedule for this year but wouldn’t be surprised in the least if it’s been delayed. The Book of Boba Fett looks promising. Actually, Star Wars Media in general looks pretty promising. My interest in the Star Wars universe has definitely turned around and is on the rise because of The Mandalorian show. God bless Favreau and Filoni. I may even read one of the new High Republic books or play Fallen Jedi.

    There are some board games I supported on Kickstarter that will be coming out this year assuming there are no further delays: Frosthaven which I mentioned in the previous post, Terraforming Mars Big Box set, and Sleeping Gods by Ryan Laukat. And in the past few days since I started my portion of this post to now, Nick showed me this: The Animation Collection from CMON on Kickstarter. I wholly blame him for my bank account dipping a little lower. The other thing I’m looking forward to is playing more board games with the family.

    As far as LEGO, I tend to stay away from rumors, and this weird place I’m in with the hobby doesn’t seem to be changing. I’ve made a pledge this year though to see if I can find that spark again. We’ll see how that goes.

    ERIC

    I love the way Ace described movies above: something to get around to. In my endless struggle to remove the anxiety of choice from my life, I’ve created something much, much worse.

    This horrible, ever-growing List.

    The List. 311 movies and counting. I’ve had this list since 2017 and it’s grown by 10 movies every month or so. So for 2021, I’m not looking forward to any new movies. I don’t think I physically can. I need to make up some serious ground on this list, or I will drown in a vat of unseen movies.

    Video games, though, are free reign. That backlog will keep getting bigger.

    Elden. Ring. From. Software. I will play any game these guys make without question. This one’s supposed to be open world, with lore by George R. R. Martin, and while both of those sound like buzzwords from 2015, I trust From Software to deliver a unique and fast paced experience.

    Hitman 3 will literally be more of the same, and that’s not a bad thing. Six more extremely detailed levels with tons of choice in how to complete a mission. I’m still waiting to see any Hitman level beat the thrill of the Paris fashion show mission, and if there were ever a time, it would be at the conclusion of the trilogy.

    Now, if someone could tell me why IOI went with Roman numerals for this one when Hitman 2 used English numerals.

    Deathloop, like Hitman, is my favorite type of game. You’re given a mission, and you complete it however you see fit. In this case, you have to figure out how to murder eight people before the day resets. It’s like Metal Gear Solid V and The Outer Wilds (two of my favorite games) combined. Oh, and you’re being hunted by an assassin.

    I have mixed feelings towards Arkane Studios’ games. I loved Prey, and while I like Dishonored in concept, I don’t think stealth works particularly well in first person. Still, with a gameplay loop as solid as Deathloop, I have little doubt this game’s gonna be great.

    It took me so long to get confident enough to play Resident Evil 7. I kept hearing how scary it was. But I played it, and in retrospect I should have had more faith in Capcom. Resident Evil has gone through so many weird tonal changes, but now that it’s back in its stride with RE7, RE2R, and RE3R, I’m all in for more Resident Evil.

    I just hope Jill or Claire show up. I’m sick of Chris.

    The only Kickstarter I ever funded, I’ve been keeping an eye on Little Devil Inside for the better part of a decade. I’m so happy to see it shown off for PS5. I’m still not 100% sure what the game itself is about, but the visual comedy and art style are extremely eye-catching. It looks so interesting that I’m getting this on day one.

    I like Left 4 Dead. I like World War Z. It’s more of the same. I can’t wait to dip into this with my friends.

    So here’s hoping there won’t be another pandemic that will delay a bunch of games.

    NICK

    What’s it count for when most of the things I was looking forward to last year didn’t actually come out? Hellblade II: Seluna’s Saga wasn’t a launch title, as I’d originally guessed, and they’ve been really cagey about giving a release date or any sort of sizable preview… so who knows. There’s the next Halo, which got delayed to this year, but I’ve never been a big Halo player. It’s a fine series, but not something I’d buy a console for (I’m in the minority for that, though).

    Maybe I’ll be able to get a PlayStation 5 at some point this year, and actually play a few of the upcoming games. I haven’t gotten around to Miles Morales yet, and there’s the upcoming Horizon 2 and a new God of War title (though I’ll be shocked if that actually shows up), as well as the now Microsoft-owned PS5 exclusive Deathloop. Everwild is supposedly targeted for this year, but there’s been little to show up.

    Honestly, though, the only game I’m sort of excited to get this year is, bizarrely, a Bioware and EA title…

    I mean, yeah, EA sucks. And I’ve played all of these games dozens of times… they are some of my favorite games of all time. It remains to be seen if they’ll be making updates and tweaks, or just uprezzing (here’s hoping for some retconning of that ending). At a minimum, hopefully they level out the control scheme between the games, similar to what Naughty Dog did with their Uncharted remaster.

    For TV, it’s going to be a Marvel sort of year. WandaVision kicks off the year in a week, followed by Falcon and the Winter Soldier in March and Loki in May, and likely several more shows after that.

    There may be a billion Star Wars projects in development, but none are scheduled to be on the service until December at the earliest as of right now (Bad Batch may show up sooner, but they’ve not announced a date other than “2021” for it). Of course, there are a lot of other media for Star Wars, with comics and the new High Republic books. I picked up Light of the Jedi last night, and started reading it, and may come around for a little book review on it to talk about the new property.

    With boardgames… is it weird that I’ve already paid for most of the board games I’m really excited for this year. I backed a few on Kickstarter last year that are scheduled for release in 2021… CMON’s Massive Darkness 2 (which will also come with some optional Zombicide tie-ins) and Resident Evil 3 come to mind. Both of them were for the minis more than the game, but still should be fun to play as well.

    I’ve never been especially interested in a regular bonsai tree, but this seems to be one that’d look nice and be fairly easy to care for.

    For LEGO… I got nothing. I’ve made no secret that LEGO just doesn’t excite me all that much anymore, and I don’t pay that close of attention to upcoming releases unless I have to post them. If I was going to pick something that I may buy, it’s already come out… the botanical sets that were part of the start of the year.

    I’m looking forward to 2021 surprising me, and hopefully starting to do it with something other than horror. There’s hope the pandemic will end, hope that maybe Canada will finally annex the US and help us get things in order, and hope that there will be plenty of good shows to stream between now and the zombie apocalypse that’s scheduled for October.