Thursday, February 22, 2007

stuffs, nonsenses and volley gunnage

So been a good while since I have written one of these and the last one was not exactly a journal entry.







Hmm how to star this one.. well lets go with something impersonal

So I am a random Irish muppet and Im also a large warhammer and 40k fan and when I saw mark of chaos coming up I just had to leap. I bought the collectors edition of yon game when it came out, and I have to say its fairly nicely packaged, the book is fairly dire fair but okay for a wasted Sunday afternoon, the soundtrack cd is just not up to the epic warhammery feel and has been relegated to the point of never ending up on my HD.

Um as a strategy game mark of chaos is not all that entertaining with actual game play consisting of something far less fun than pulling weeds and deeply familiar in that it differs little from any of the total war games. What it does do is replicate in many ways the overall basic play of a real warhammer game (though gods I have felt the need to hurl dice at people) while removing all the things that make that entertaining happy happy fun time. It also removes the things that made total war entertaining while still retaining a certain epic scale.

Youve probably played this before, maybe not as very shiny, (and it really is fairly shiny) maybe not with the deep dark warhammery goodness and details which blizzard bless there black hearts may do there best to homage but just can never match) or with the collectors edition the wee metal figurine and the soundtrack and the book (I might add the figurine/marker is now making a fine addition to our local gaming table and is fairy nice).

Take a melee battalion, place on hill, take projectile battalion place behind them, dump cav on the sides and artillery in the middle, charge down hill, win. While the tortured terrain in many of the maps makes this a task to arrange and the single player is fairly detailed it just doesn't do it with little with health markers and the like really not making for all that varied or challenging an experience.

For all its "im so pretty look at my tudor / imperial buildings and detailed characters with there many moustaches" (and this is impressive) its just not been fun to play and my mates and I have tried the multilayer on lan a fair bit. It has all the grating entertainment value of playing the exceedingly nasty level jeep rushing AT gun spamming COH AI except these are your friends or at least humans your meant to be enjoying competing with, but ..you dont.

Now the army builder is nice and I wouldn't mind if games workshop would release such a level of shiny things for the actual game of but as for the rest of it? It just wasn't worth the money it really wasn't and the disappointment was quite annoying after all the shinyness in the screenies seen about the place. It could be just the over hyped experience but I feel put out by this .

I did however enjoy the volley guns.


I then bought Supreme Commander. Ehem I may loose a great deal of my life now.

Um yeah anyway hello from Letterkenny. Now doing two jobs to make one bad wage, still playing nation states and all the related stuffs, though the bar work has pretty much dried up for some reason. Life has been fairly steady lately with not a whole heap of activity over the winter months though freethinker did visit though that had less to do with DA and more to do with NS. He fell of the plane rather ill I am afraid and the trip was a bit of a flop as he spent a fair bit of it in our spare bedroom asleep. Um what else, on NS Ive pretty much frozen up over the past few weeks with my post count bottoming out completely. I don't know why, its not writers block I just cant seem to post sometimes ..I would blame teh ennui but honestly I am fairly okay at the moment.

In further news got a paid commission (YAY!) on devart a rare thing for me indeed so yah must get that done.

Oh and I got a shiny new rock lappy, it is most pleasant to once more be mobile when drawing. Apart from that the flight of the earls commemoration is coming up and I was considering (after the urgings of several people) to do some sort of work on the event.