PC • If there’s one thing missing from today’s high-tech landscape of centrifuge-killing viruses, hacking, long-game defense projects designed surreptitiously in conjunction with Silicon Valley, it’s the warm glow of a NORAD CRT. Fear not, for Terminal Conflict is here to return you to the good old days of mutually-assured destruction.
Well, this has been a hell of a week. We need to apologize for the disaster that befell our previous forums, but then ask you to put your hands together for the one, the only, Kelsey for figuring out how to piece together a solution. Thus, we have new forums. You’ll need to sign up again if you haven’t already and, please, make sure you monitor your spam folder when you’re looking for that activation email. I’m currently looking at how to get everyone’s Patreon badges working in the new space. Please contact me (dave@statelyplay.com) if it’s been a few days and your title and badge still haven’t been applied. Oh, and if you don’t have a badge because you don’t support our Patreon, why not give it a go? [nice slide into sleazy barker mode, loser -ed.] After the break you’ll spy everything that the writers and I will be playing this weekend. Or at least hope to play. It’s volleyball tryout weekend, so I’ll be driving and sitting in gyms most of the weekend meaning I’ll probably be on my Switch. I can’t wait.
Switch • So, Civilization VI arrived for Switch this morning and, because I want to make sure everyone at Firaxis can send their kids to college, I bought it. Again. This is the third, maybe fourth, time I’ve bought Civ VI now, each time at $60, not to mention all the DLC I’ve also chipped in for on each and every platform. Civ VI for Switch is fine but the entire time I was playing, I was wondering why I wasn’t just playing it on my iPad. The iPad screen is bigger and the touch controls are just so much more intuitive. They did a great job of reworking the UI for the Switch, but when I want to open something and it’s tied to a button on the Switch, I invariably have to search for exactly what key is where. My fingers don’t know where the Y key is versus the X key, for example, and I find myself opening and closing menus or selecting this when I wanted to select that, that my 15 minutes with Civ VI felt like a chore. That brings me to Diablo 3 which launched last week for Switch and, I assumed, would be a perfect fit for the handheld. Oh, boy.
As we get our new forums up and running, I wanted to mention that lots of folks had seen their activation emails go to their spam folders, so keep an eye on that. If you’re having troubles, hit me up on Twitter (I’m “rinelk”); if not, feel free to use your new forum account to make suggestions on this post. While I’m at it, KeyForge releases today, and my thoughts on that border on marketing spam themselves, so this seems like a good opportunity to bring them up.
Just so everyone’s aware, our forums are down right now. Something went wrong with a Discourse update and everything went kaplooey, but we’re (Kelsey) is working on it and should, hopefully, have things back to normal in no time. I’m going to refrain from posting any news/reviews articles until Discourse is back up and running as anything posting now will have no comment capability, and what’s the fun in that? See you soon.
PC/Mac • I went into Return of the Obra Dinn with high expectations, stemming from its designer, Lucas Pope. You might know Mr. Pope as the creator of the thought-provoking and terrifying Papers, Please, a game that crawled into your skull and stuck with you well after you closed your laptop. Return of the Obra Dinn does the same, and it’s one of the best experiences I’ve had on my laptop in a long time.
Tabletop • As someone who’s spent much of their life in Wisconsin, I’ve been taught to react with revulsion to anything that comes from south of the border, the Wisconsin/Illinois border, to be exact. It’s just not cool to show any appreciation for Cubs, Bulls, or even the pristine, toll-funded freeways that turn into potholed monstrosities as you meander north. Now, having a wife that lived for many years in Chicago (and living there myself for a period) has made me a tad more appreciative of what other Wisconsonites call FIBs. It’s with this more accepting eye that I peered at a new board game on Kickstarter set in the City of Big Shoulders called, appropriately, City of the Big Shoulders. It looks and sounds like Automobile and Arkwright had a baby, and I’m more than okay with that.
PC/Mac/Linux • The first game I ever played was PC Research’s 1983 survival horror game, 3-Demon. And by survival horror, I obviously mean a first-person vector riff on Pac Man. John D. Price and Rick Richardson’s intimate maze-em-up was austere and unsettling, branded as a seminal experience into soft, impressionable neurons. So, imagine if that sort of ambience dropped tired old phantoms for battlesuits in a near-future subterranean lair? Das Geisterschiff, which arm should I present for cannulation, come November 25th?
PC/Mac/Linux • Since the release of Sentinels of the Multiverse on iPad way back in 2014 Handelabra, has established themselves as one of the top board game devs in the biz, right up there with Playdek and Czech Games. While I get that Sentinels, Bottom of the 9th, and One Deck Dungeon aren’t in everyone’s wheelhouse, you can’t deny that everything they touch is polished to a blinding sheen. Thus, when they announce a new project or, as is the case today, launch a new Kickstarter, we listen. We already knew they’re working on digital versions of both Spirit Island and Aeon’s End, and it’s the latter that is now available on everyone’s favorite crowdfunder.
It’s autumn here in the northern midwest [it’s autumn everywhere north of the equator, you idiot -ed.] and we’re getting our last batch of sun-filled days cool enough to comfortably wear a sweatshirt, yet warm enough that you can sit outside and not converse through chattering teeth. As such, I’ve decided to take this afternoon off and go hang out with my kids when they get home from school. What will we do? No idea, but I assume it will involve jumping and leaf piles. Why am I telling you all this? Because it appears the Stately Staff is doing the same. We’re awfully light on glimpses into the future this week, but we’ll give you what we got. Just a warning, I’m dying to get out there and enjoy the weather, so we might be light on links, too. Yep, it’s a full-blown disaster of a post. Huzzah! Have a good weekend, everyone!