Min-maxing the Blogosphere since 2008

My first Internet gaming addiction was to the amazing Quakeworld Team Fortress. After a 10 year wait TF2 has finally was finally released in December and I’d been wanting to try it out ever since, so yesterday I took advantage of the fact that The Orange Box costs half as much on Steam as it does to buy in a store and bought the damn thing. The latest incarnation of TF left me scratching my head at times, but it manages to scratch that nostalgic itch in a good way.

TF2 is a strange beast. It’s like the original but with the sharp corners rounded off, a funky paint job, and a shiny coat of lacquer. The number one major difference, beyond the obvious graphical changes, is that there are no grenades of any kind, off-hand or otherwise. When I first heard this I thought it wouldn’t be a big deal, but it turns out that it makes a big difference to how the game feels. As a soldier you have your RL, shotty, axe/spade, and nothing else. Gone are the days of throwing a nail grenade up onto a ledge to kill a sentry gun or timing your grenade so that it explodes simultaneously with your rocket impact. No nail grenades, concussion grenades, mirv grenades, or flame grenades. It seems like pyros get shafted hardest because they also lose their flame-rocket launcher, meaning that they have no effective way of taking out a sentry gun from a distance. Engineers come a close second in emasculation, having lost their devastating EMP grenades.

Graphically TF2 is a huge improvement over the original and its cousin TFC, with cartoon-like models which give the game a fun, slapstick tone. Adding to the fun is the fact that the game tracks who has killed whom and assigns nemesis status to people who’ve taken you out a lot, rewarding you with a cry of “REVENGE!” when you kill them. There are also UT-like announcements that pronounce people’s prowess when they kill a whole bunch of people in a row and the game tracks stats like how long you’ve been alive, how many people you’ve killed since dying, or how much healing you’ve done and presents you with a snippet of this information whenever you die.

The changes to the classes which jumped out most at me are the aforementioned removal of the pyros RL, addition of a teleporter to the engineer’s building options, removal of detpacks from the demoman, addition of a cloaking field to the spy, change to the way the sniper rifle works (it’s now fired by clicking rather than releasing the mouse button), and overhauling of the medic healing. Medics can now heal from a distance with a short ranged, auto-aiming healing gun and when they do so they build up a charge which they can expend to make themselves invincible for a time. Battlefield healing is now much more of a possibility than it was previously.

Is the loss of grenades a deal breaker? It certainly radically changes the play experience. The game still feels action packed, but it’s as though it’s been repackaged for a more casual audience. In general I feel that all the additions have been good for the game, particularly the spy’s cloaking field and the changes to medic healing, but I mourn the loss of everything that was taken out. I’ll certainly continue playing the game, but I’ll be yearning for the grenade spamming days of yesteryear.

I found some free time on Friday to bust out my new and (very slightly) improved black-green two headed giant deck on MTG Online. The minor changes which I’d made to it were to strip out the Llanower Elves, replacing them with Elves of Deep Shadow to help with mana fixing, and switching the three random Kavu Climbers, which cost too much for what they did, for Wild Sizes, which are lower cost and still net me card advantage. I jumped into the casual multiplayer room and joined a 2HG game to test it out.

My partner was Jaredten playing a 5-colour green sliver deck and our opponents were Sleepy7 and Chapliin playing black-green agro-control and monoblack agro respectively. My opening hand contained no mana acceleration, so I happily shared a big deck mulligan when it came around. I ended up with a hand containing containing acceleration and my favourite disenchanting fatty, Indrik Stomphowler.

Chapliin started off agressively with Vampire Bats, but the cost of pumping them kept him from developing his board position. Jaredten’s hand was mostly off-colour, but plentiful Gemhide Slivers kept him viable with their mana fixing. I started racing Chapliin with my Moldervine Cloak wearing Elves, which took a dirtnap after being hit by Chapliin’s Big Game Hunter, but I dredged back the Cloak, stuck it on another weenie, and continued the beatdown.

In the midgame Jaredtan was facing down a Silklash Spider with his Slivers and I was up against a Dross Crocodile. Wildsize pushed me through the Crocodile, giving me a 2 for 1, and Jaredtan managed to punch through due to a combination of Sleepy7 blocking poorly and Chandra Nalaar appearing at Jaredtan’s side to finish off the battered Spider.

Things looked good until Sisters of Stone Death joined Sleepy7’s side of the table, threatening to start stealing Slivers, and Nightmare made an appearance on Chapliin’s side. I had no answer for either, although I was holding Nekrataal in my hand. Damn black creatures! I needed to draw a Putrefy, but ended up with another Moldervine Cloak instead, which I stacked onto my beater and swung past the now-cowering Nightmare. Jaredtan top-decked a Stonewood Invocation, which let him ambush the Sisters after they forced his Sinew Sliver to block, whilst also making him untargetable by their theft effect.

On my turn Chapliin chumped my attackers poorly, sacrificing all his small creatures to avoid dying to a surprise Wildsize, then Jaredtan swung home with a horde of Slivers for the win. I never even had to play Indrik or Nekrataal.

I remember now why I had the Llanowers in there; my deck is much more hungry for green than it is for black, but luckily it wasn’t a problem during this game. I’m very happy with Wildsize over Kavu Climber, since it seems to frequently 2 for 1 and it’s usually more useful to have a bonus card after paying 3 mana than it is after paying 5 and having none left to use the card you draw.

Mistress S, Biodecay, DA, and Kharn all pitched in to buy me Starcraft: The Boardgame for my birthday this week, which I wasn’t at all expecting and was thrilled to receive. I was itching to give it a burl, and when my prior plans for Sunday fell through I did a quick ring around and rustled up 5 players to join me in a battle for the fate of the galaxy. SC:TBG is a very lavishly produced affair, with scads of tokens, cards, and nicely sculpted plastic miniatures, making for a slightly fiddly, but very satisfying aesthetic experience. The actual gameplay itself seemed well designed and developed after two plays, although the rules were pretty involved which bogged things down at first. I played one 6 player game about 2/3 of the way through and a 3 player game through to completion. The 3 player game was great fun, but the 6 game experience made it clear that introductory games are best played with 3-4 people.

Setup time was at least half an hour, including punching out cardboard chits, and sorting things out but would probably be around 15 minutes or less now that everything is sorted into my biohazardous waste sample baggies. Rules explanation took a very long time, as it always does on first plays of ameritrash games. Mistress S and Biodecay’s eyes glazed over slightly as my lengthy explanations rambled on, giving rise to the dreaded comment “this is very complicated.” Ultimately I screwed up here, because it’s really not complicated, the core mechanics of the game are remarkably intuitive and once you’ve played one or two rounds you get into the swing of things, but because I hadn’t taught the game before, and wasn’t all that sure of the rules myself, there was a lot of umming and ahhing and referring to the game manual. In the future I’m going to give a demonstration run through a full turn of a mock 2 player game, using all the different kinds of orders and including a combat to demonstrate how all the moving parts fit together.

Rules-wise the game is actually quite straightforward. Players take it in turns to place order tokens face down on the planets which everyone is battling over. The orders on a planet get stacked up on top of one another, with orders higher up being executed before ones lower down in the stack. Once everyone’s put down 4 orders, everyone takes turns revealing an order of theirs and executing it. There are only 3 types of order: Mobilize, which lets you move and start a fight; Build, which lets you make units, transports, workers, and base upgrades; and Research, which gets you more cards, both of the regular and special varieties. With an upgraded base you get access to super versions of the normal orders, which do the same thing, but give a bonus like making your guys better at attacking when their Mobilize order gets them into a fight. The interesting thing is that the stack mechanism means you have to make sure that your orders get revealed in the right order, relative to both your own orders and those of others; for instance you want to make sure that you execute your build order before your opponent executes their mobilize order so that you can have enough troops to mount an effective defense. Combat is a matter of choosing cards from your hand and revealing them simultaneously, with higher valued cards winning the fight but only being playable if you have the correct units in the battle. Research adds extra cards to your deck and to your hand, which let you bend this basic formula and generally cause shenanigans. The game is won by accruing victory points, which you get from controlling certain areas on planets, or alternatively by achieving your race’s special victory condition, which is roughly the same difficulty for everyone.

The 6 player game saw my Protoss overrun by Biodecay’s Zerg, despite managing to tech up to Archons in an attempt to counter his Mutalisks. I expanded too far too early and Bio took advantage of my overextension to punish me and set up his special victory condition. An early battle between Spamy’s Protoss and Mistress S’s Zerg over their closest expansion planet saw both of them weakened relative to the rest of the board and locked in a war that both of them wished would end. Fluffy’s Terrans suffered from some misplaced orders, which prevented him from putting pressure on Valenos’ Terrans, who developed a stranglehold on the two planets he needed for his special victory and let him quickly tech up to Battle Cruisers with Yamato Cannons virtually unimpeded. The game was tense and saw a lot of conflict, but was plagued by slow play and uncertainty over rules. A general sense of frustration hung over the game as Mistress S, who is no fan of rules lawyering, clashed with myself and others whose love of nit-picking is rivaled only by child grooming habits of OCD afflicted monkeys, whilst the game moved forward with the glacial slowness of 6 people battling analysis paralysis. Eventually we had to call it a night because half the players needed to head home in order to be able to get to work at a reasonable hour the next day. Spamy, Valenos, and I decided to give it another crack with 3 players.

With just 3 people and a bit of experience under out belts, the game progressed much faster and was a lot more fun, despite the fact that we were all mentally and physically exhausted by about midway through. I tried pulling the same trick that Bio had pulled on me in the previous game, massing Mutalisks and charging at Spamy’s Terrans before he had an opportunity to prepare himself properly. I had set up my starting planets so that my economy was much stronger than the other players, but at the expense of having no possibility of hitting the number of victory points required for a regular win, meaning I’d have to invade three planets and establish bases on all of them for my special victory condition. On the decisive turn for my attack, I swept into Spamy’s base and massacred the units he had there, which were unable to fight back against my air units. Spamy had been counting on Valenos’ Protoss to maintain pressure on my rear so that I couldn’t fully commit myself, but Valenos had decided to tech instead. Facing units from me that he couldn’t destroy, Spamy instead charged into Valenos’ ill defended territory and harassed his economy. Valenos realized that he had made a mistake in allowing me to push through Spamy with no fear of reprisal and set about massing an army to punish me on the following turn.

On the final turn of the game we all started with a shot at winning. Spamy had been producing 4 VPs a turn from turn 1 and was threatening a regular win unless we could dislodge him. I was about to build a base on a third planet, thereby claiming my special victory condition. Valenos had a sizable assault force massed by my borders ready to claim him enough territory to win via his special victory condition. I struck first, pushing Spamy off one of his VP locations and putting him out of reach of victory by 1 turn. Spamy tried valiantly to rush Valenos’ Archon defended base with stimpacked Marines and Wraiths to eek out a win by taking a VP location to replace the one I stole from him, but the Archon mowed him down. I had tried desperately to prevent an invasion of my natural expansion, but Valenos’ event card from the previous turn gave him the bonus actions that he needed to crush my base there. The strangest part of the turn was that Valenos was able to attack my final region on the expansion planet containing a Zergling and an Ultralisk and, because the attacker chooses who is on the front line, set things up so that the Zergling was fighting an Archon with my Ultralisk forced into a support role. The Zergling was unsurprisingly minced and the splash damage from the Archon killed my Ultralisk, which just goes to show how much of an advantage the attacker gains from the ability to chose who fights whom, but which caught me completely unawares, despite the fact that I had pointed out a different move earlier in the turn that could have triggered a similarly strange fight. Valenos’ final actions gave him the territory he needed for the win. Everyone agreed that it had been a good game, that they had a much better feel for how to play, and also that they’d all had a legitimate shot at winning, which kept things tense and interesting all the way through.

I would rate the game around the same level as A Game of Thrones, perhaps an 8/10, but I haven’t had enough plays to fully grok how the game plays out typically. I’m keen to play a 2v2 game, since I’ve heard that the game shines in that format. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys AGOT and wants to buy a sci-fi themed ameritrash wargame. I think that after a few plays, SC:TBG will get the nod as my 4X board game of choice over the currently reigning Twilight Imperium 3, because it’s far less of a dice-fest, takes less time to play, and encourages aggressive play, which leads to more conflict and a more interesting game as a result.

About two years ago I was playing 4-6 hours or so of World of Warcraft a day. This was in the early days of WoW, when it had just been released and the push was on to be the first guild on each server to field a full team of level 60s, ready to zerg their way through end game content. I’d committed myself to being on the leadership team of my guild again, for the third game in a row, so the pressure was on me to maintain the pace with the fastest power levelers in a hardcore guild of powergamers. I pulled marathon sessions duoing with my guild leader and running instances in the second tier of characters coming through to the end game, because we’d been slow off the mark and refused to grind 24/7.

That play experience for me set the tone for World of Warcraft. Hardcore, guild based play, highly organized and regimented, with a long range strategy for becoming the premier horde guild on the Blackrock server and staying that way. We pulled it off too, until too many players burnt out and politics forced the rest into retirement. I pulled out before that happened though, because my honours year of university was looming and there was no way I was going to sacrifice my academic future in aid of growing my e-peen.

After basically going cold turkey for about a year, I dabbled casually in WoW every now and then, but without a serious guild backing me up I felt like I was swimming with only one arm. Last year though, some old university friends of mine started up their own guild and have been plugging steadily away at the game. I joined them for the initial push, but my interest waned and I was interrupted by travel, so I fell behind.

Recently though, I’ve started up WoW again with my lovely girlfriend Mistress S, questing away in a Druid and Hunter duo and I have to say that WoW is a lot of fun as a casual gamer. Previously I powergamed my way through in a race to the establish the guild at the forefront of the servers serious raiding community. This time around I’m taking the time to smell the mageroyal, read the lore, and potter around lazily. It really is an awesome game, in my opinion the best cooperative game ever made, and suits itself well to many different play styles. Playing with your partner is a particularly rewarding. Mistress S and I rip it up together for a deeply satisfying gaming and bonding experience.

Every now and then though, I think back on my überguild days and miss raging across Southshore with 30 other guild mates, ganking people 20 levels below us until they log on their high level alts for a fight. Happy days. Then I also remember having to adjudicate people arguments over loot, waiting hours for people to turn up to raids, or hours in the queues for raids that are too full. The casual WoW experience may be a watered down version of the hardcore thing, but at least the utterly crap bits are a diluted down to virtual non-existence.

Welcome future reader scouring through the archives of my blog! I have started this blog because I felt that I needed a forum to rant outside of the social networking sites that I’m a part of. I particularly want to spin off my public thoughts on gaming from the rest of the private drivel that I bash out in LiveJournal and the like. This blog is called Powergamers Anonymous because I’m gaming addict. Gaming has been a huge part of my life since waaaay back in the my primary school years. I’m a very diverse gamer; I love everything from Go, to Poker, to World of Warcraft, and Magic the Gathering. I’ve been a serious MMOG powergamer, been in the leadership team of a 100+ person online guild that spanned multiple games, and held executive roles in real life gaming clubs. I love playing games and talking about games. I’ve reached the point where I probably should be over my love affair with gaming and pick up a serious hobby like stock market speculation or the like, but it’s so entrenched a part of my identity that instead I’ve decided to just celebrate it and build an online shrine to gaming through reporting my day to day gaming experiences.

Powergamers Anonymous is going to be used to natter about games that I’ve recently played, gaming projects that I’m undertaking, and gaming relevant stuff that I stumble across on the net. I expect that the overwhelming majority of posts will be about everyday gaming experiences and session reports. For now it’s just a blog, but in the future it may turn into something more impressive.