Welcome back, my dear fiends! In this gloaming hour we have for you the ghastly first quest of the Lightbearer, a suicide mission into the gullet of giant worm, and I don’t mean wyrm with a “y.” No, this behemoth is the maggoty, squirmy kind. Do you think you have the “stomach” for this tale? We shall see. (TW for body horror).
Hello my ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties and things that go “bump” in the night! It’s uh, still Sunday night, right? No… well, never mind then. This week, I’m starting my creative playthrough/AAR of Tales of Maj’Eyal as a Writhing One. TW for body horror in roughly the same vein as Mary Shelly, David Cronenberg, H.P. Lovecraft (of course), and my nightmares as I entered adolescence. We’re not getting into Human Centipede territory because even I have limits. It’s my intention to stay as close as possible to the official lore of ToME and to the key in-game events without being pedantic about either one. We’re not doing this is chess notation.
While I know it’s not the most beloved game around these parts, I seem to have fallen pretty hard for One Deck Dungeon from Handelabra. I purchased the Forest of Shadows expansions and promo cards and discovered Quick Play mode which randomly pits one or two adventurers against one of the 10 or so bosses. It’s fantastic. I love learning the quirks of each class and using the hero progression to slowly give them new abilities for the next time they randomly get called to service. I’ve played for hours at a time this week which is not something I’ve done with a video game in quite a while. I bring this up because I will probably be playing it quite a bit over the weekend as well along with a few other things. We’ll all be playing games over the weekend and to see which ones, skip past the jump.
Alice is dead. So is Lisette Coalface. Halfling Shadowblade and Dwarven Berserker, they died in shockingly similar ways, neither overwhelmed by a tide of foes nor slain in dire melee with some fell champion, no, each was humbled by a single critical-hit with a spell. I begin to see why they massacred all the wizards (game lore… of course there are a great many spellcasters-in-hiding).
So much for Sunday night… or early Monday morning. Well, better late than never, I always say [they do always say that, and I always pull out my hair and scream at them to no avail -ed.] From the moment I wrote about the importance of keeping “decadent” 3D art and animation out of roguelikes, I knew I’d need to re-load Wazhack. Wazhack, if you haven’t played it, is a roguelike that breaks a lot of the rules about what roguelikes look like and how they play, while remaining shockingly faithful to the feel of the genre. Wazhack is a side-scrolling roguelike with fully animated low-poly 3D art that plays out in a kind of frozen “real time” that makes it the roguelike ancestor of Superhot, though it plays more like Steamworld Heist than anything, especially with any ranged or magical class.
Alas, another week is ending which means there should be loads of free time to get some gaming in. Unfortunately it’s also a holiday weekend here in the States, which means my game time will be spent not playing games and, instead, doing family things. The horror! Actually, I was supposed to have an overnight gaming holiday with my game group, but that was nixed by the wife and, instead, I’ll be heading up to the Upper Penninsula of Michigan to fish. When I say “fish” I mean put worms on my kids’ hooks and remove fish from said hooks when they get lucky. I rarely get to drop my own line in the water. Could be worse. Have a great weekend and we’ll see you again on Tuesday.
I shouldn’t have been such a hard case about the Black Death last time, I appear to have attracted the attentions of disease spirits and spent much of last weekend sick in bed. I beheld the Angel of Death and prepared to meet my end… but then it turned out that I was only re-watching Angels in America (the HBO miniseries). It’s really good, by the way – if you haven’t seen it, you really should.
I know, I know, it’s been weeks since we’ve posted our supposedly weekly Scrying. It’s definitely not an issue with the writers. They’ve been submitting their scryings through the slot on my door every Friday just as they should. I just keep running out of time and, by the time I find myself in front of my trusty laptop, the weekend is already nearing an end. I vowed to not make the same mistake this week, so I carved out time specifically to make sure the Scrying arrived on Friday night. Jump past the break to see if I made good on my vow.
Welcome to what may become a regular SP Sunday-night feature, if you’re in the US (more like second breakfast or elevensies time in NZ). I’ve always fancied myself a decidedly non-prime hours horror host, in the vein of Vampira, Elvira, and Commander USA. Don’t remember Commander USA? Just imagine Watchmen’s The Comedian unconvincingly faking enthusiasm for El Santo movies and “drawing on” his hand with his cigar. I asked editorial for a wardrobe budget, but all I got back was a series of farty noises, so just imagine me in a LBD and a smoking jacket, wearing a wig stolen from a community theatre production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, sitting in a ridiculously oversized Gothic armchair next to a roaring fireplace (burning official strategy guides and AOL diskettes, ‘natch) and cradling a coffee mug bigger than my head in my arms with a degree of tenderness usually reserved for newborn babies and Alpha Edition Magic: the Gathering cards. Got it? Good, let’s go.
It’s been a long, news-less week behind the scenes at Stately Play. Too much stuff to do and too little time to do it. So, I missed the launch of Banner Saga 3 and…well, that’s the biggest news bit you didn’t get from our front page. Next week is looking tough as well. I’ll be on vacation Monday and Tuesday and then heading down to Gen Con where I’ll be getting all sorts of news (I already have an interesting tidbit from CGE that I will share as soon as I’m legally able to). Will I be posting it right away? Hopefully. My plan is to write up what I saw each day and post it the next day, so you’ll get Thursday’s news on Friday and Friday-Sunday’s news early the next week. That’s the plan, at least, but you know how those go around here. If you don’t, please see my Liberty or Death or Darkest Night videos for an example. Onward to the weekend!