All My Base

If you've ever been on the internet you've heard of Minecraft. Much like an oversized vibrator there is a rather large buzz. And much like this oversized vibrator that everyone is telling you is the great, eventually you'll become tempted to try it out yourself and see if it fits.

Wait, what?

Anyway, point is I found a Minecraft demo. And since every other page on stumble seems to be about Minecraft I figured I'd have a look and see if I could work out how to play it. I'd looked briefly at the Classic mode thing they had on the website, but never really got into it. I mean, whats the point in building a house out of TNT if you can't set it off? So, having finally found a demo, the opportunity to get a look at the actual game play was most welcome.

4th Dimensional Monster Googlon

So, there I am, scrolling through the recommended feeds in google reader, as usual wishing they'd take the hint that I have absolutely no interest in failblog, when I for some reason get this post.

Not sure why, but it looks kinda cool, so fair enough. I see this thing:

And I idly think to myself that it looks a bit like an Ultraman monster. Then I scroll down.

IT'S FUCKING BULLTON.

Hows that for scary? And I'm pretty sure those others are actually all Ultraman monsters in disguise as well. As soon as I get in  I'm getting out the Ultra Data File and looking them up. As to the question of why exactly it is that the soviets felt compelled to build their monuments in the form of various Ultra series kaiju, the answer is obvious:


Because it's AWESOME.

Doomcrawl Dungeon Chapter 3: Abacus

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLHHHHHHHHHHHHHHGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

A screaming horde of Skittering Rat-Things barreled down the corridor towards Maris

"TALLPOINTYDEATHKILLRUNRUNRUN!!!!!" They screamed in no particular order.

Maris sighed wearily. "one, two, five, ten, twelve...."

Doctor WTF?

I'm going to talk a little about The Impossible Astronaut now. How could I not? And whilst I normally like to review things in an elliptical and obtuse fashion to avoid discussing important plot details, in this case I think there is little choice. The following ramble WILL contain SPOILERS. Massive hairy spoilers from space that will destroy you and everything you ever loved with their nasty spoileranium axes. If you haven't already watched the episode then stop reading this and GO AND WATCH IT. Don't look at the internet until you're done.

In order to provide a suitable break between the introduction and the meat of the article is an adorable baby sloth.

There's a metaphor here if you think about it.

Now, where were we?

Doomcrawl Dungeon Chapter 2: Vermin

Being undead, Maris was quite well acquainted with the futility of life. He saw it practically every week in the faces of heavily armoured idiots charging towards him over a pile of dead Orcs. Or Lizard Men. Or Spider-Bats or Crepuscular Bone Gnawers, or Phantom Maggot Wraiths from the Lesser Plains of Xin or whatever else happened to be in whichever section of the dungeon complex he found himself in. There was a particular moment. Maris had learned to spot it after several years of practice. You had to be quick, because it only lasted a fraction of a second. But it was there. Just as they notice out of the corner of their eye that the guy on their left is having his tongue pulled out the back of his head, the wizard behind them is on fire and something they previously considered dead is launching itself violently upwards through their own spine. Just at this point a look flits momentarily across the hapless adventurers face. A look that says that, in the brief second before they die they fully understand that everything they've done up until this point was actually completely pointless in the worst possible way.

If Maris had a face, that's the look it would have been permanently fixed into.

This Was A Triumph

Guess what I played yesterday.

Once again, I really can't believe no one else has done this already. I mean, someone must have, but it didn't come up on google image search when I looked so it doesn't count. Right?

And for the benefit of google image search, yes, this is my attempt at a picture of PINHEAD from HELLRAISER holding the COMPANION CUBE from PORTAL instead of the LAMENT CONFIGURATION PUZZLE BOX. Gotta love all those keywords.

Not really much I can say about Portal though that hasn't already been said a thousand times far more eloquently than I'd ever manage. Yes, it's good. If you haven't already played it then you should probably remedy that situation at some point.

The best part is, of course, that I am now fully qualified to question the philosophical validity of a variety of baked confection.

Doomcrawl Dungeon Chapter 1: Stairs

Maris stomped disconsolately up the stairs from the lower levels. To anyone coming the opposite direction down the rough hewn stone corridors he would most likely have appeared as rather terrifying figure. But that was hardly his fault, it was rather hard to look friendly when you're dead. Not, he thought to himself, that it was the being dead part the was necessarily the problem. No, it was the fact that he was still MOVING that got to people. Had he just lain unmoving in the corridor then no one would give him a second glance (once the first glance had confirmed he had nothing worth stealing anyway), but put his skeletal form in a flowing black robe and send it stomping down a darkened corridor and suddenly everyone cops an attitude.

"In my experience," Maris thought "mortals have an overly propriety attitude to locomotion."

+1 Punctuation

I joined up to Boardgame Geek recently. It seemed fairly sensible as I do have a bit of a soft spot for such things and was hoping to be able to get some good recommendations on games to try. I can't be the only one who wants something along the lines of Heroquest or Space Crusade but doesn't want to have sell any organs to get a copy.

Anyway, as I was browsing around one thing that caught my eye was Hero: Immortal King: The lair Of Lich. Now that's a rather laboured title for anything, but it appealed to me anyway. What the game promised was a light dungeony card game that could be played solo. This to me sounded ideal, so nipped straight over to ebay and snapped up a copy. Yesterday it arrived, so after tea I opened it up and tried it out.

The game is pretty straightforward and simple. Indeed, the major reason I found myself revisiting the rulebook (aside from the obvious first time unfamiliarity) was that I was sure there was something I must be missing. You get a limited selection of heroes and equipment cards from which you must choose a starting lineup of 5 cards. Then the dungeon cards come in 4 ranks of presumably increasing difficulty which are shuffled and divided into 3 corridors. The idea is to fight your way through at least one of these to the final boss monster that waits behind them all. When you defeat a card you keep it and it can be spent to activate equipment or special abilities.

Even considering that one of the heroes is an elf this all seems pretty good. Heroes have 3 special abilities: 1 permanent, 1 that can be used by spending a mana point (which can be regenerated by defeating certain cards) and 1 ultimate power that can only be activated by spending a combination of won cards that has thus far eluded me. You also have to spend some combination of these cards in order to activate any magic items you may have taken. Again, whether or not you can actually get these cards is another matter entirely. Combat is pretty straightforward. The monster on the card has a value. You roll a D6 and use whatever modifiers you have available to beat it. If you win then take the card and draw another. If you lose you lose one of your courage tokens and the card remains. When you loose all of your tokens it's game over.

And whilst this is all nice and simple and plays very fast it's also where the problems with this game start to show. Simply put it's VERY easy for the game to stall completely when you draw a set of thing that you cannot beat under any circumstance. I.E. That's how EVERY game I played went. The grounds for success are rather binary, and as such it's far to common to simply hit a wall. This isn't particularly satisfying in gaming terms. It's not even as if you can hurl yourself repeatedly at the monster until you run out of lives hoping for a critical hit. You simply end up looking at a set of monsters you can't possibly fight and then giving up and going home. Call me old fashioned, but that doesn't seem very adventurous to me. I don't mind dying a heroic death in a game. Hell, I don't mind dying a pointless ignominious death as long as it's entertaining.

Turn 3 Chasm anybody?

But that's not really the feel you get from this game. Whilst there's a good idea in here it doesn't quite work. Something is missing. And whilst I get that the idea of the game is to be a simple as possible I think that something is granularity. You have this interesting mechanic of collecting up the defeated cards to use as a resource, but then have very little to actually do with them. All the ultimate abilities have the same cost and are presumably equivalent, but I can't help thinking it would be better if their costs and abilities varied, thus giving the player some choices to make. Do you take the character with the powerful ability you can use once if you're lucky, or the character with the weak ability that you can use more often? The choice of using or saving the cards would, I think, make the game more interesting, but this is not a possibility that is ever really addressed. Sure, you could conceivably face some sort of choice depending on what equipment you brought, but in practice it seems you hit the wall before ever getting to that stage, which is disappointing.

I really want to like this game, since it does have some good points. It's small, fast and inexpensive. It's got some decent art, and the basic idea is good. However the execution is lacking something. I must confess that I find it odd that this whole wall issue never came up in playtesting.

I think that there are a few possibilities for house rules to salvage the whole thing though. Since the difficulty of the cards is, in essence, ranked 1 to 4 it gives us a couple of possibilities. So I'd try firstly a rule where you're able to spend a card for a one time combat bonus. This way you stand more chance of progressing past the wall stage, but it costs you a resource. The other suggestion would be taking the remaining treasure cards and shuffling them into a treasure pile. then, when you defeat a monster you can search for treasure by rolling the D6 and getting under it's difficulty rank. If you succeed then draw a treasure card, if not don't. The next dungeon card is then played face down. I think this would help with the tone of the game a lot, since one of the best parts about Dungeoneering is, of course, looking for treasure. Something that the standard game lacks completely.

I should also take a moment to make a point about the difficulty, or apparent lack thereof as referenced by a couple of the reviews on Boardgame Geek itself. There is a point made that rather than hitting the wall the game becomes ridiculously easy if you simply use character X and Y. I forget their actual names. Now, I'm not disputing that it becomes easier with these characters. Indeed, by the sound of it they would go a long way to fix the whole wall problem. No, the simple issue that nobody seems to have mentioned is that NEITHER of these characters are actually in this set. There are 3 decks overall, which you can mix together if you so choose. I'm sure that adding the various elements together could well make for a more satisfying experience overall, but there is a part of me that baulks at the prospect of having to buy another 2 sets simply to enjoy the one I already have.

So, overall we have a nice idea that sadly lacks something in the execution. The game pieces are all of fairly good quality, and the game itself is simple to learn, but in the end that simplicity works against I think, as it lacks a certain spark to elevate above the whole "reveal card, roll dice, repeat" mechanic. A good shot a creating a solitaire dungeon game, but not quite successful in creating the right vibe.

and before you ask, yes, I've ordered a copy of Dungeoneer now.

Are You Experienced?

So then, I've just got back from the Doctor Who Experience. Well, not quite just. I had a kebab and watched The Eleventh Hour first. But that's not the point. The point is that I finally went to check it out, so now I can tell you about it.

Whilst it's not a complete pain to get to, it is worth noting that it seems to be based near some sort of college or something, and thus to approach it we were forced to wade through legions of students.

Like this, only far less entertaining.

Quite why they were coating the streets like a human slime mold and not off studying something (or better yet GETTING JOBS) is not something I'm really sure of, and in any case is rather outside the scope of this article.

Once free of the yattering horde we finally approached the building proper, which I must admit seemed a bit... odd. I mean, it's like an office building or something. You go in, and are directed upstairs. And in the lift there is a dedicated hapless drone to push the buttons for you.

Seriously. There were actual lift attendants. I was FREAKING OUT. Clearly this area is far too posh for the likes of me.

Well, apart from the students.

Anyway, what of the actual show?

Well, we go in and buy are tickets which then allow us access to a sort of holding area before the interactive portion. There are a few exhibits from the new series, but basically this is for a queuing system in between groups. I would imagine that it gets quite busy on the weekends, but then that's why we came on a Friday. After a bit of waiting around we are then let in to the actual experience. And I have to say that the whole thing was simply FANTASTIC.

Obviously, this bit may contain some SPOILERS.

So, after a short video presentation we are led through a crack in time into a museum vault on the Starship UK.

You heard me.

The level of detail in this room is awesome. There's all kinds of stuff scattered around to spot, and whilst a couple of things are highlighted, there's plenty more to look for. I mean, screens from Magpie Electricals, a Clockwork Droid head, the sign from the pub from The Daemons... All kinds of awesome hidden away. I didn't even notice until I was looking through the pictures in the program afterwards that one of the Ranis' T-Rex foetuses was sitting on a shelf. Great stuff.

After a short presentation we receive a transmission from the Doctor, and the the TARDIS materialises and we all go aboard.

You heard me.

We lurch through time and space a little, before materialising on Dalek saucer. In the middle of a Dalek civil war.

You heard me.

After narrowly avoiding extermination we dash down a time corridor, through a ruined landscape of Weeping Angels, and into, strangely enough, a 3D cinema for the finale. Now I've gone on record about not being particularly enthused with the whole 3D thing before, but I have to say that this was pretty good. The 3D effects were actually well realized, giving an actual sense of depth and reach, and it was short enough that it didn't completely do my head in or make my eyes bleed.

To say that I proceeded through these various stages with a giant shit eating grin is, in all fairness, fairly accurate. I mean, seriously, how cool was all that? I can only imagine what it's like to be a 12 year old boy seeing that.

Lower down I would guess.

But seriously, awesome stuff. Kids don't know how lucky they are with all this.

After all that excitement we THEN get out into the exhibition area. Now, I must confess that in the grand scale of Doctor Who exhibitions this wasn't the largest or widest ranging collection. But the I HAVE been to most of the shows in the past few years. What we have here is, however, a bloody good display of a wide ranging history of the show. There's modern stuff, there's older stuff. Some replicas, some restored, some original. And this is a first. Previously we've had shows from all new series stuff, and before it closed there was the museum in Blackpool which had a all classic stuff. But never have they been presented as one before. So we have modern Cybermen along with a display of Cyber heads from history. Or a timeline of Daleks from the Dead Planet all the way up to the new paradigm behemoths. Ood, Hath, Ice Warriors, Zygons and a full spectrum of Sontarans.

Notable by their absence were the Hoix and a Vashta Nerada suit. Out for repair? or out for something else? Only time will tell, but why let that get in the way of a good rumor?

An interesting diversion in here is the green screen photo stand, where you can buy photographs of yourself badly photoshopped into a limited choice of backgrounds. Whilst I didn't really rate most of them, the Pandorica interior one was actually pretty good. Though mostly that's because you got to sit in a replica of the chair from the Pandorica. No doubt if I was bale to have a facebook this would be added to my profile. I would put it up here, but it's got me in it. So just be grateful I'm sparing you that particular misfortune.

After the exhibition there is then, off course, the little shop. Personally I wasn't as impressed by this as I would have liked. Whilst the offerings were okay the selection and pricing wasn't particularly breathtaking. Although that may just be that nowhere ever seems to have Dalek Sec figures these days, and that's the main one I'm after.

Really, is it so much to ask?

But that's neither here nor there. The point is that this is a great exhibition. The whole interactive experience idea stands out and really makes it, with the exhibition like the icing on the top. If icing was made of TARDISes and wobots (yes, WOBOT).

Would I go again? Hell yeah. I'm going to. The only question is when. After all, it's been said that the exhibits will be updated with the new series. So come the mid season break  I'd imagine there'll be all manner of interesting new things to see.

If you're a fan of Doctor Who you should undoubtedly go. And if you're not a fan of Doctor Who you should undoubtedly sort your life out as there's something wrong with you.