I recently contributed to RPGnet's Sci-Fi and Horror Review Weeks. For those who have enjoyed reading my game reviews here on Wombatzone, here are links to those reviews:
Review: Sufficiently Advanced (more up-to-date than my previous review here)
Review: Witch Hunter: The Invisible World
Review: Against the Darkness
Iron Man - Extremis part 5, Written by Warren Ellis, Illustrated by Adi Granov
So here we are at issue 5. I have mixed feelings about how things turned out.
In all fairness, this is not a bad story. It's not in the realm of Identity Crisis (the best-written bad comic of 2004). If they filmed a movie off of this, I'd be in line opening day. Yes, if they filmed a movie off of any script, I'd be in line opening day, but the point remains. The book does not have bad art. If they used the art as production art for a movie. . .OK, I'd wonder if the projector bulb needed changing, but it's still excellent, if it's not vibrant.
We also get Ellis' take on Iron Man's origins, and Granov's take on the first Iron Man Armor and it's not bad. In fact, I can almost forgive all the parts I didn't like about issue five just for the line "Say hello to the Iron Man, you terrorist scum." Almost. It's just, after much mulling it over, I don't like the idea of Stark rewiring his own brain.
Iron Man - Extremis part 4, Written by Warren Ellis, Illustrated by Adi Granov
Well. here we are once more. This was actually supposed to be a much more detailed review of Iron Man: Extremis part four. However, I neglected to actually bring the comic with me on the trip, so I’m operating off of memory here. I’m sure if I mess something up too badly, someone will complain. The short version: The art is good, the dialog is good. I'm not so sure about the direction the plot is taking however. My major complaint is the page count is a little sparse for a quarterly.
Sufficiently Advanced is an RPG-in-progress by Colin Fredericks. This review is of the quickstart rules posted at http://www.livejournal.com/communities/suffadv.
Dogs in the Vineyard is one of a crop of "indie" RPGs that have come out in the last year or two. Influenced by the game-design theory of "The Forge" website (http://www.indie-rpgs.com), many of these games share characteristics that set them apart from mainstream RPGs. They seek neither expansive rules that cover every possible situation nor "light" rules that disappear into the background, but rather very specific, almost procedural mechanics that directly reinforce (and sometimes even "force") the desired play experience. Likewise, neither world-building nor "story" is a goal -- rather, the focus is on producing certain situations in play, where the characters face important decisions. The idea of a coherent game universe has no value outside those specific situations in actual play. The idea that the GM should have a story in mind -- even in the most bare-bones form -- is actively deprecated on the grounds that the characters' (and players') decisions will be less "real" if they feel even slightly that one result would be preferable for the sake of the overall narrative. Dogs in the Vineyard follows that model quite faithfully.
The Serenity RPG is a licensed game based on the movie Serenity, which is itself a continuation of the television series Firefly. It was written by Jamie Chambers and published by Margaret Weis Productions.
I'm not overly fond of the last two Star Wars prequels. I don't regard them with the raving, fulminating hatred that some do, but neither do I hold that they are the revealed final truths of life and cinema. They are simply two movies which have a number of excellent scenes but fail to connect them into a truly impressive film. They also suffer from structural flaws which don't make them unwatchable, but do damage their ability to seamlessly mesh with what little is mentioned about the characters in Episode IV. Nothing I had seen or heard had led me to believe that Episode III would be any improvement.
Naturally the wife and I were in line at 9:30pm Wednesday for the first midnight show.
