Category: Columns

Regular columns from the GH team

10/11/17

Tracer Rounds: What Do You Buy, Read, or Play?

Rapid fire thoughts about your game acquisitions ~

Brant Guillory, 11 October 2017

Plenty of us have a stack of wargames that we haven’t played yet. And quite frankly, there’s a not-insignificant portion of that stack that is, in all honesty, unlikely to ever get played. Occasionally, we’re just holding onto something in unpunched condition (ie, “investing”). Sometimes we got it, read thru it a bit, and decided we weren’t going to play it after all. But how many of us bought something with the express purpose of studying the game more than playing it?

What do you buy? What do you read or study? And what do you actually play?

That brings up a very interesting three-part question: What do you buy? What do you read or study? And what do you actually play?

In my case, I buy a lot of games from designers and companies I like to support (that said, I’m a bad comparison for “what do you buy?” because as the editor at GrogHeads and a regular reviewer of games, I don’t spend nearly as much on games as it might appear). But the games that I study and the games that I play do tend to diverge quite a bit. Continue reading →

10/9/17

What’s Gus Playing? Episode 2

The diminutive duke of danger is back ~

Lloyd Sabin, 9 October 2017

Alrighty here is the second installment of What’s Gus Playing? Covers Darkwood, why I pretty much sucked at it and why I am shelving it for now.

So it goes without saying that when summer ends and the weather finally cools, I get in to a spooky mindset.

You know me. Yes you. And that guy too. We’ve known each other for a long time. And you know that this time of year I love to scare the bejeezus out of myself. I mean, just look here at this thread – I didn’t even create it myself.

So it goes without saying that when summer ends and the weather finally cools, I get in to a spooky mindset. This season’s first attempt at PC gaming fear comes courtesy of Darkwood, a top-down perspective game developed with the Unity engine by Acid Wizard studios. Reading that last sentence, how could Darkwood NOT scare the crap out of most players?

Well I guess there is one way. Darkwood prides itself on not holding the player’s hand, and being merciless in its treatment of its players in general. I can corroborate this. I died, got hopelessly trapped and restarted the game…all more than once. This week, while trying to navigate Darkwood in the off-hours, was a rough one: long days at work, wife away, tons of chores and errands with the kids and I was also sick. So…it may not have been the best week to attempt a game that only wanted to crush me in its bony green fingers. Continue reading →

10/2/17

What’s Gus Playing? Episode 1

A new regular read from the Halfling of Happiness ~

Lloyd Sabin, 2 October 2017

Hey all. It’s been a while, you know with real life getting in the way. To make up for lost time, BB and I thought it wouldn’t be the worst idea in the world to start a new weekly piece, cleverly entitled What’s Gus Playing {insert obvious joke here}.

This first installment covers my last few hours with the absolutely gorgeous, quite impressive full conversion mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, named Enderal, developed by German modder and AI tinkerer SureAI. This link will take you to the pertinents, including where and how to download.

The actual modding process is extremely well documented and pretty painless, especially if you have been modding PC games since before Steam workshop and know The Struggle that modding used to be like.

I’ve already put in about 25-30 hours into the Enderal mod. According to the internet I am about half of the way through the intricate story line, and it is just as good or better than a lot of professionally developed games. That is on top of the ~150 hours I’ve put in to the Skyrim base game and most of the DLCs. It’s hard to believe the game is 6+ years old. Which begs the question…where is the next Elder Scrolls game? But…I digress. Below are some screen shots of What I’ve Been Playing for the last few days. I think you’ll agree they are quite impressive. And if you don’t agree well I never liked you that much anyway.

Look at the detail here. You can see that the creators really loved what they were doing and developed Enderal with a loving hand.

Continue reading →

07/10/17

Tracer Rounds: The Nostalgia of Mystara

A photographic journey through an adventurous youth ~

Brant Guillory, 10 July 2017

Most images enlarge when you click them

This started as a set of pics for a personal inventory of the RPG collection.  It turned into about half of the collection – this isn’t even all the TSR stuff! – but I wanted to at least get a some of the collection archived.  Once I had the pics, though, I figured it was time to bring back at least one random episode of Tracer Rounds, and share some pics and commentary on the Mystara collection.

As an aside, for folks who are really interested in Mystara, you should check out the Bruce Heard episode of the GrogCast, wherein we ask about his background with Mystara, and get a few good inside stories from the glory days of TSR.

Mystara, for those that don’t know, was the expansion of the game world that was first introduced in the X1 module that accompanied the expert-level set of the original no-prefix D&D, starting around 1981.  As the rules grew from basic to expert to companion and beyond, the rules series became known as the BECMI series.

How many of us started our adventures here?

Continue reading →

09/19/16

Tracer Rounds: The Best Damn Songwriting You Never Appreciated

Can we finally give Guns ‘n Roses their due ~

Brant, 19 September 2016

Things have been a little too heavy lately, and we need to talk about something completely different…  So can we just take a step back and spend a few minutes admiring what totally bad-ass, criminally-under-rated, and never-appreciated songwriters the guys from Guns’n Roses were?  Sure, we all know the ‘hits’ – Welcome to the Jungle, November Rain, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, You Could Be Mine, and Sweet Child o’ Mine – and the ‘scandal’ songs like Used to Love Her, or It’s So Easy.  But once you get beyond the radio tunes (or heck, even with the radio tunes) the quality of songwriting you get from the band so far exceeds their contemporaries that they’re not even in the same galaxy.tr-gnr

Back in the late-80s, the popular talk was comparing GnR to The Rolling Stones, under the premise that supposedly no other band had conquered the rock and roll world on their own terms to the degree that GnR did.  That was typical rock journalist hyperbole, of course.  But honestly, the depth of songwriting, quality of musicianship, and production was blowing most other acts at the time out of the water – even GnR’s supposed contemporaries.  Motley Crue didn’t figure out how to write a song until their 4th album; Poison never quite did.  Ratt’s riffs were impeccable, but aside from the one-off lyrical curiosity like Wanted Man, they didn’t keep up.  Great White?  Slaughter?  Bulletboys?  XYZ?  Rough Cutt?  Firehouse?  Please.  Don’t embarrass yourself suggesting them.

Continue reading →