07/25/14

GrogHeads Reviews Paper Sorceror

Review by Avery Abernethy,  25 July 2014

                Paper Sorcerer is a turn-based, small party, role-playing game.  Released by Runaway Games after a successful Kickstarter proposal, Paper Sorcerer harkens back to the early days of RPGs such as the early Wizardry, Ultima, and Gold Box D&D dungeons like Pool of Radiance or Eye of the Beholder.  This review is based on my completion of the game after approximately eighteen hours of play on a newish Falcon Northwest personal computer.  My copy of Paper Sorcerer was purchased from www.gog.com on sale for $3.99.  The download was fast and the installation was smooth.

Paper Sorcerer has one of the most creative background stories that I have encountered.  Your main character is an evil sorcerer who has been banished into a book by a party of four good characters.  The book is your prison.  It is also the prison of a host of other evil types.  But a limited number of “good” heroes have also entered the book to keep all of the bad guys from magically breaking the bindings of the book and earning freedom in an unsuspecting world.  The background story is largely told in a short animated sequence at the start of the game and reinforced with minimal background information learned as you explore the dungeon.

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07/23/14

Wargaming History – A Look Into The Past

University of Maryland Professor (and more importantly, wargamer!) Matt Kirschenbaum is on a European odyssey this summer.  While in Switzerland for an academic conference, he made time to swing by a local museum and found an excellent display of wargaming history.

 

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I was recently in Lausanne, Switzerland for a conference and, well, it rained the entire week. Looking around for something to do I noticed the Swiss Games Musuem, Le Musee Suisse du Jeu, was a short train ride away in the nearby town of La Tour de Pielz. Reading further, I discovered the museum was housed in a castle. A games museum in a castle? Let’s go! Upon arrival, I found two unexpected bonuses: first, the weather briefly cleared, *and* there was a special exhibition of WWI games on!

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07/20/14

GrogHeads Reviews Valiant Hearts: The Great War

A review by Lloyd Sabin, 20 July 2014

Published by Ubisoft Montpellier

As always, click images to enlarge

Emotions and War

I don’t typically wear my emotions on my sleeve. In the last 20 years I think I have shed tears three times in front of my own wife. But there are certain events and historical phenomenon that bring out the sensitive, skinny-jean-and-mesh-truck-cap wearing emo in me…and World War I is at that top of the list.

Why, specifically? I don’t know. Maybe I view World War I through too romantic a lens and I believe so much of what has been written about it: “lions led by donkeys,” the “death of innocence” and “good bye to all that.” Those terms and the emotions, places, and situations they describe really resonate with me in a way that no other historical era does.

Zeppelins are portrayed in Valiant Hearts and you'll have to learn how to take them down!
Zeppelins are portrayed in Valiant Hearts and you’ll have to learn how to take them down!

It’s strange because I had direct contact with World War II through my grandparents: its horrors and its triumphs – so much so that World War II became almost commonplace to me. Where and when I grew up, everyone had a father, or more likely a grandfather, who fought in it. World War I is murkier; I have never knowingly met anyone who was there, so I have constructed what it was like for combatants on all sides in my own head. And this has produced a war where vengeance and justice have been replaced with melancholy and the longing for “the way things were before.” By World War II the world collectively knew that there was no going back; during World War I this loss was still very new and very fresh. This hazy, general feeling of loss and grief is captured masterfully by Valiant Hearts: The Great War (VH:TGW).

Paris at night, before the Battle of the Marne.
Paris at night, before the Battle of the Marne.

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