My new tabletop game : BumKiller!

There's been a recent, worldwide rash of gang attacks on bums. Or, perhaps, a recent, worldwide rash of reporting of already frequent gang attacks on bums.

According to gamepolitics, people are quick to blame these beatings on videogames.

As always, there's one sticky wicket -- there isn't actually a game that allows you to get a gang of people together and beat defenseless homeless people to death.

Until Now.

I'd like to announce my new tabletop game, BumKiller!

What you need to play BumKiller! :
5 players
one six-sided die

The rules :
Every player rolls the die, and the player to the right of the highest roll is the "Bum". All the other players are the "Emo Teens".

The first "Emo Teen" that beats the "Bum" to death wins the game. You beat the bum by rolling the dice.

These are what the die rolls do :

1 - Swing at Bum and miss
2 - Swing at Bum and miss
3 - Swing at Bum and miss
4 - Swing at Bum and miss
5 - Swing at Bum and miss
6 - Listen to Emo and Die

So, now, everytime you hear about people beating a bum to death, remember, they are only doing it because I invented this game.

The Traitor

I tried blogging somewhere else today.

Behold!

My first day in City of Villains

The first hour or two of every new RTS is always painful. It takes a while to sort out the units, buildings and the commands.

You can jump right into action games and shooters. Instead of farting around in another blasted RTS tutorial, you can kill things right away.

Learning a new MMORPG's is the worst. It takes a couple days to even be able to play a new game.

I'm in the difficult, boring part of City of Villains right now.

For an added bonus, every time you start the game this updater runs first. And no matter how much I fool around with my router, it doesn't work very well. I eventually found a way on the forums to skip the updater on the forums. But without that, the game was unplayable.

Picking a new subscription game

I have needs, after all.

There are three games I'm looking at, right now.

EVE Online - I checked out the 14-day free trial. Not the best game ever, but still a good amount of fun. I'm a sucker for space games.

Laser Squad Nemesis - Not an MMO. A play-by-email strategy game written by some of the X-COM guys.

I've played the demo several times. Pretty cool. I'm a little worried about the time commitment of an email game. Not that it is too much time or too little, but that I can't control the time I spend on a day-to-day basis. If I am playing 4 games, I have to take 4 turns most of the time when I play. I can't take time off. But, if I'm only playing one game, I can't really play more, unless I want to start a new game.

City of Villains - The only one without a free trial or demo. The only one of the three with a mandatory retail purchase. The one that will cost $100 since I'll drag my wife into it.

So, anyway, my name is Mr. Style. I am the Scourge of the Fashionless.

Why I never beat X-Com : UFO Defense

It's a great game. But, ultimately, the core mechanic gets a little old.

Tactical turn-based combat is fun. Coming out of a transport and blasting aliens from a downed UFO is fun. Unfortunately, doing it 100 times is not 100 times more fun. It gets old. It would probably get old even if it wasn't the same battle over and over.

This time, I eventually started ignoring the tactical encouters to speed things up.

I won.

On difficulty and XCOM : UFO Defense

At first, there is nothing. The earth rests in tranquility.

You see, I've just started a new game of X-COM : UFO Defense. I dug up my old Collector's Edition copy and downloaded a 3rd party patch from here. Since I'm rusty, I start a game on "Ridiculously Easy", or whatever they call the easiest of the five difficulty levels.

I place my base and then wait. The earth is tranquil, blah blah blah.

Then I receive a warning. A UFO has been spotted. A single red X skitters across North America. I launch an intercept. A yellow X emerges from my base and angles towards the UFO. The X's intersect and air combat begins.

I don't remember the controls exactly, but I remember enough to down the UFO. With that taken care of, I send my operative-laden transport to the crash site.

My transport lands, and I carefully deploy my soldiers, one by one, and click the "End of Turn" button.

A single alien emerges from an unexplored portion of the map and fires a Blaster Bomb at my soldiers, killing all eight. Since all my soldiers are dead, I also lose my transport. Good game.

A question about Bob Marley

Does any Bob Marley song really need to be longer than about 15 seconds?

Everything I Love Must Be Destroyed

At least when it comes to tv shows. Let's review.

Live Action The Tick
Awesome. Cancelled.

Andy Richter Controls The Universe
Transcendant. Cancelled.

Home Movies
Freaking Awesome. Cancelled twice.

Venture Brothers
Best tv show ever. Almost Cancelled.

Stroker and Hoop
Hilarious. Probably will be cancelled.

Futurama
They never actually got it on TV. Cancelled.

Arrested Development
That jetpack episode was the best sitcom episode ever. You better believe it got cancelled.

Simpsons
Awesome. Still around, but not as funny

Family Guy
Huge. Cancelled once.

UK Coupling
Was fantastic until Jeff left after season three. Who cares whether or not it's been cancelled?

Ren & Stimpy
Cancelled for all intents and purposes after the first two seasons, when it started to suck. Cancelled for real after like seven more painful seasons.

Just a note here : if you're a comedy writer, disgusting things are not funny. Ok, they are funny sometimes. For every ten gross-out jokes you make, one is funny. Build your entire series around gross-out jokes (aka Ren & Stimpy after season 2) and I will track you down and kick you hard in your face.

The Life

My DVD player went to that big through my window in the sky over the weekend.

While I was at Best Buy picking up a replacement, some crazy man (not me) bought the second season of Home Movies on DVD.

Home Movies rocks.

On Mainstreamization

According to this article at The Escapist, Mainstreamization is a word.

At least, it's a made up word that you would use. Like, not one you would make up, and then avoid.

The advent of that unfortunate word came about because, you see, the mainstream causes video games to suck. So many people like video games, and spend money on them, that they get worse. Money makes everything worse. Wait, how does money make things worse?

When I was young, I had my first harrowing encounter with The Dread Pirate Mainstreamization. You see, I grew up in a small town. The only establishment that sold new video games in my small town was the (now defunct) Ames Department Store.

My brother and I enjoyed playing the video games. My brother even subscribed to Nintendo Power. And so we could read about cool video games in Nintendo Power, and then go out and buy them at Ames, right?

Wrong. I don't know whether it was the doings of Ames or Nintendo, but Ames only carried about Eight NES Titles at any particular moment. Eight Also-Ran NES Titles. So, while we were reading about The Adventures of Link and Mega Man, we could pop right on over to Ames to buy The Adventures of Bayou Billy and Sky Shark.

But Walmart carries bestsellers. It carries your Links and your Mega Men. And my hometown is finally getting a Walmart. Twenty years too late.

I guess that isn't really a harrowing encounter with mainstreamization, so much as a harrowing encounter with unmainstreamedization. And I suppose I should go on to say that this one particular moment of unhappiness as a child should shape your entire world view, but I lack the will.

Regardless, The Mainstream spends large amounts of money on video games, which benefits us all. Without The Mainstream there would be no Consoles. There would be no consumer video cards, sound cards, and the PC itself might not even exist. There would certainly be no indie games, no niche games, no hardcore games for Those Who Are Not The Mainstream For They are Hardcore to enjoy.

So, treat the video gaming The Mainstream much like you treat any other The Mainstream. It exists to draw attention to the medium, to attract money to the medium, and to attract more casual players that will turn into The Hardcore.

Be in The Mainstream, but not of The Mainstream