Zephyrus of the Anemoi

Several iPhone developers have chosen to have sales this weekend, in the spirit of Black Friday, and Thanksgiving. Some of these sales are pretty nice.

For example, Electronic Arts has slashed prices on a number of their products to 60% or even 50% of their original price. One such game is Wolfenstein RPG, which I picked up immediately, as I’ve been waiting for it to go on sale. While Wolfenstein is famous for being a first-person shooter, it translates really well into an RPG. It doesn’t feel turn-based at all until you enter combat, at which point the enemies just don’t shoot at you until you’ve either moved, fired a weapon, or done some other action. There are puzzles and experience points and all the things that make RPGs great, as well as some great moments of humor (for example, there are chickens everywhere that you can kill in a variety of ways to turn into chicken dinners for health).

In fact, all of id Software’s titles are on sale this weekend, so if you’ve been interested in DOOM Resurrection (an on-rails shooter that’s been very well received) or Wolfenstein Classic (the classic PC game from the early 90s, perfectly recreated for play on the iPhone and iPod Touch), now is the perfect time to pick them up.

In fact, most EA iPhone titles are available (around 30 of them) at the discounted price, so if there are any you’ve been eyeing, but were waiting for a discount, now is the time to check them out.

The other title that I was really excited to find out is on sale this weekend, is Hero of Sparta by Gameloft. When iPhone OS 2.0 first came out, the company Digital Legends Entertainment released Kroll, a beautiful-3D brawler that had some of the most amazing graphics seen on a portable device, but fairly low on gameplay techniques and replay value. Hero of Sparta took it a step further by marrying those beautiful graphics that the iPhone was capable of to a more solid control scheme with more action and a lot more gameplay value. If you are a fan of hack-and-slash action games, then Hero of Sparta is a good choice for you.

Keep your eyes peeled for better deals out there, because if there was ever a good time to find great deals on iPhone software, this weekend is likely to be it.

I love board games. There are a lot of board games that I find to be incredibly fun. The games I enjoy the most are those that are based in fictional realms of fantasy and science fiction: particularly those that require the players to work together in some fashion. You may remember some time ago when I wrote about some of the games we played the last time I had a gaming day.

When I was about 10 years old, Milton Bradley released a game called HeroQuest in the US (the UK got it a year earlier). My cousin got it for Christmas, and after playing it with him, I decided I simply had to have it. Essentially, one player is a dungeon master laying out doors, monsters, furniture, traps, etc. and all other players form a band of Heroes that journey into the dungeon to accomplish some goal, slay monsters, and find treasure. A friend across the street also picked up a copy of the game, and we spent many, many hours playing through quests, building our own, and then playing through those.

I didn’t have the luxury of spending much time playing Dungeons & Dragons (I knew one group that played and spent one day playing, but we didn’t hang out much and I never got to try again), so HeroQuest was the closest I ever came to playing a tabletop role-playing game. Sure, it was more of a “dungeon crawler” than an RPG, but it still stuck with me throughout my childhood and young adult life.

Fast forward to just after college. My cousin Adam and I are sharing an apartment with Andrew (his brother) and then later Jesse (my brother). It is at the time when Jesse moves in, that I first discover Warhammer Quest. I had heard of this game before, thanks to a strong similarity between it and HeroQuest (much of the game world for HeroQuest was lifted out of Warhammer’s fantasy world and simplified for young gamers). Thankfully, Adam picked up a copy off eBay one day and we all got a chance to try it out.

The big plus to Warhammer Quest was the ability to randomly generate dungeons, eliminating the need for a player to be “the bad guy”. After a handful of games, however, it became obvious that in order for us to play a game quickly, we’d all have to either read the rather large instruction books cover to cover, or play several games with someone that had until we felt comfortable not looking something up every 30 seconds. The game went into a closet and began to collect dust.

I was at Adam’s house a couple months ago, picking up some stuff for my newborn baby, when I found my old HeroQuest figurines in his closet (I had been searching for them for 6 months or more). And sitting there, untouched for the last couple years, was Warhammer Quest. Adam took it down and told me that if I’d actually play it, I could take it with me. Nerd joy exploded in my heart.

And so it was, that on Saturday, November 7th, I invited my cousins over to play. The plan was to have a complete Saturday doing nothing but having some “nerd fun”. In the end, Andrew, Alex, Rachel (Alex’s sister), and Bri (Alex’s girlfriend) arrived for some Warhammering.

I chose, as always, to play the Elf. Andrew picked up the trusty old Barbarian, Rachel snagged the Dwarf, and Bri took up the Wizard. Since we had five players, Alex chose to play one of the add-on characters that Games Workshop released after the game was available: the Warrior Priest.

The first dungeon went fine, and fairly quickly even though three players had never even touched a Games Workshop game before. We each got to learn a little about how best to work together and the newbies got a good feel for their characters. The second dungeon, however…

We came to a t-junction in the dungeon early on and chose the wrong path. Of course, by the time we discovered it was the wrong path, we had encountered a fair number of murderous beings. Although the Warrior Priest was able to heal (Bri, unfortunately, drew only Resurrection for her healing spell as the Wizard, making it difficult to assist much), his Blessings were erratic at best, and did not restore health at a quick pace.

Thus, when my Elf was down to a mere 1 Wound remaining before death, my companions decided to simply walk off without me, leaving me several steps behind and unable to catch up to the healer. This actually turned out to be slightly advantageous. I say slightly, because in Warhammer Quest, when an Unexpected Event occurs and monsters are placed on the board, they are placed in the room with the Heroes. However, if one or more Heroes are in separate rooms, then they are randomly placed into one of the rooms.

I was quite thankful then, when the room they were to be placed into was not my room. That was, until I discovered that the enemies we would be facing were Goblin Archers. Thanks to a number of fortuitous dice rolls, I was able to remain standing until the villainous creatures were thrust out of this world and into the next (mostly via the application of pointy objects to their vital organs, though once or twice via blunt objects to the same and/or magic lightning to their everythings). I rejoined my compatriots, received my healing, and promptly smacked the Warrior Priest upside the head.

I mean, my character did that. Not me. I’m not my character.

Please don’t tell my therapist I said that.

And so we journeyed onward, found the chamber of evil bad things, murdered them all, and everyone went home mostly happy. Alex even remarked, during the course of the last dungeon, “Can we do this more often?” I’d say that counts as a win. I can’t wait until the next time we get together when I will be playing as an Elf Ranger, one of the add-on characters. I’ll let you know how it goes.

So, I recently stopped subscribing to MobileMe because I’m broke. Don’t get me wrong, I love the service and think it’s incredible. But, given a choice between putting food on the table and syncing bookmarks, contacts, etc. between computers, I choose food. At least 73% of the time.

As a result, I recently re-published my iWeb that was hosted there over at this domain. It was relatively painless, thanks to iWeb 3′s inclusion of FTP support for publishing. I may actually start working on some additional iWeb stuff on top of my blog here in the future, as I’ve always enjoyed the way my sites turn out with the app.

Anyway, you can find it here.

The blog will likely stay up until I re-post them all on this blog for archival purposes. No point in having multiple blogs out there.

So I watched the pilot for V this week, but have been putting off writing a post about it until I could assemble my thoughts. But if I wait much longer, everything I’ll have wanted to say will have been said already, and I don’t want my faithful readers (all two of you) to feel that I am unoriginal.

There are spoilers ahead. You have been warned.

So far, I’m cautiously optimistic about the show, but the reasons why are what’s really important.

To begin, I’ve seen the original miniseries and found it remarkable. It was well-paced, fairly well-acted (despite the involvement of The Beastmaster), and had an excellent subtext hearkening back to the Nazi rise to power before World War 2.

Having said that, I’ll explain what I liked about the reimagining. For starters, the opening 10 minutes is really solid, with a well-crafted portrayal of the various primary chracters going about their daily lives as the V’s arrive. A plane falls out of the sky, its pilot unconsciously parachuting to the ground. The ships appear overhead and cause fear and panic. There’s even an excellent tongue-in-cheek moment where a kid being interviewed for the news points out that the V’s entrance is right out of Independence Day, while his friend comments that ID4 was a rip-off of many movies that came before.

Another thing I like about it is that it’s going to give us the opportunity to see a lot more of the story, as the original incarnation of the show was canceled during its first season, leaving much of the story unfinished. Assuming this show makes it two seasons, it would be enough to complete the cycle satisfactorily.

The show has some excellent cinematography. The leader of the V’s and her right-hand man are often shown at angles that make them seem imposing or menacing. There are even scenes where Ana (the leader) is made to look even more lizard-like through the use of lights, shadows, and angles.

Lastly, the show hints that the current instability in our world is due to alien agents causing wars and economic depression. My wife has taken that to mean that the show is trying to tell us that GWB is an alien.

But unfortunately, there are things about the show that aren’t so great. For starters, having seen the miniseries, I was disappointed with how quickly the key secrets of the story were given away much too quickly. Essentially, the first 90 minutes of the V miniseries was compressed into one episode of the new series. I had hoped the series would go the opposite direction and stretch out the story, not shorten it.

Further, what made the miniseries so great was the use of a character that had survived Germany in WW2 and spoke about how the same shift in power and loss of civil rights was happening again. While it would not make sense to have the same character in this story due to the 20 year time difference, I do hope that some sort of parallels are drawn as the series progresses.

Lastly, I mourn the death of Alan Tudyk’s character so early in the show. Having a mole in the FBI during the course of the series would have been an excellent way to drive the plot and characters forward. Revealing their true identities so early and ending their characters’ lives eliminates the possibility of having those elements for at least several episodes while they set up new characters to replace Alan Tudyk’s dead one.

All-in-all, V is about what I expected it to be. I had little hope it would be a great show, and wasn’t even sure it would be a good show. I’ll tune in next week to see where the series progresses, but I’m not expecting anything extraordinary. But it’s fun sci-fi/action with pretty actors, so it’ll do to fill my down time at work.