What I'm playing right now...

Hi,

So, I got a download of the demo version of Left 4 Dead 2. I can't tell you how jazzed this demo has made me for the full game. The big add this time around is a suite of melee weapons. You find them lying around and pick them up (they replace your pistol). There are any number of them, but I discovered:

• The machete lops of heads and limbs with delightful ease. Chopping through dense zombie underbrush with a stirring "Crikey!" is fun.
  
• The frying pan is less gore-inducing and seems to have less "reach" (weapon models for games like this rarely take weapon length into consideration so if this isn't my imagination, kudos to the development team). The giggle-inducing *KLANG!* when you connect never really gets old.
  
• But for sheer melee mayhem, I don't think there's anything that tops an Electric Guitar beatdown.
  

The guitar combines the long-reach lethality of the machete with the funny sound effects of the frying pan. Mowing down 2 or 3 on-rushing zombies with a guitar riff makes you want to run around and shout "ELLLLL KABONG!" over and over again. When I first picked one up, I completed the entire demo using nothing but it. My kill count was terrible, but each and every foe who fell to my "axe" was memorable.

The new special zombies and the "uncommon" common infected (members of the zombie horde with a small wrinkle to them) are all great. The Charger is scary until you learn to stand to one side and gun it down. The Spitter is probably my least favorite since it almost always tends to dish out some damage, either with the spit or via its corpse after you kill it. The Jockey is just there to humiliate you. Overall, this looks to be a fantastic game.

I have also been playing far too much of the new downloadable add-on for Grand Theft Auto 4 -- The Ballad of Gay Tony. This particular add-on basically says "hey, remember all the really crazy stuff you did in GTA3:San Andreas? Yeah, we stuck it all in here." You run with high-rollers who need a lot of dirty work done to get their impossible dreams realized and you get lots of crazy hardware to get it done. The BASE jumping scenarios look like they'll be a fun and diverting challenge.

So yeah, lots of great stuff out there.
Tom

What I'm playing right now...

Hi,

So, I got a download of the demo version of Left 4 Dead 2. I can't tell you how jazzed this demo has made me for the full game. The big add this time around is a suite of melee weapons. You find them lying around and pick them up (they replace your pistol). There are any number of them, but I discovered:

• The machete lops of heads and limbs with delightful ease. Chopping through dense zombie underbrush with a stirring "Crikey!" is fun.
  
• The frying pan is less gore-inducing and seems to have less "reach" (weapon models for games like this rarely take weapon length into consideration so if this isn't my imagination, kudos to the development team). The giggle-inducing *KLANG!* when you connect never really gets old.
  
• But for sheer melee mayhem, I don't think there's anything that tops an Electric Guitar beatdown.
  

The guitar combines the long-reach lethality of the machete with the funny sound effects of the frying pan. Mowing down 2 or 3 on-rushing zombies with a guitar riff makes you want to run around and shout "ELLLLL KABONG!" over and over again. When I first picked one up, I completed the entire demo using nothing but it. My kill count was terrible, but each and every foe who fell to my "axe" was memorable.

The new special zombies and the "uncommon" common infected (members of the zombie horde with a small wrinkle to them) are all great. The Charger is scary until you learn to stand to one side and gun it down. The Spitter is probably my least favorite since it almost always tends to dish out some damage, either with the spit or via its corpse after you kill it. The Jockey is just there to humiliate you. Overall, this looks to be a fantastic game.

I have also been playing far too much of the new downloadable add-on for Grand Theft Auto 4 -- The Ballad of Gay Tony. This particular add-on basically says "hey, remember all the really crazy stuff you did in GTA3:San Andreas? Yeah, we stuck it all in here." You run with high-rollers who need a lot of dirty work done to get their impossible dreams realized and you get lots of crazy hardware to get it done. The BASE jumping scenarios look like they'll be a fun and diverting challenge.

So yeah, lots of great stuff out there.
Tom

Viva la Reviewalation!

Hi,

So, one of the great things about wargamming is that I've actually learned a great deal of history. Yeah, yeah, history is more than a series of battles or kings, but my gaming has often served as a starting point to learn more about a period of history or culture. Certainly my knowledge of the Vietnam was was spotty at best until I started playing Charlie Company and now I feel like I know a heck of a lot more than I did at the end of high school or college.

In that vein, I've been thinking about South America. I don't really know a huge amount about the history of South America. Actually, I know a huge amount about Nazca lines and Incan ceques, but real history? Not so much. It occured to me that probably a lot of people don't know a lot about it either. So I have this idea where I would put together a series of wargames depicting conflicts throughout the history of South America. People could show up and play the games and get a series of glimpses into something they didn't know much about.

Of course, this means I have to learn something about South American history and that's why I picked up Liberators: Latin America's Struggle for Independence by Robert Harvey. Obviously, it covers a bit more than just South America (as Spain owned most of the New World at the time), but South America is the chief focus and that's where much of the action takes place.

As a history it didn't quite have the same pull as a fiction book might and it took me a bit longer to get through it. On the other hand, the various personalities involved in freeing South America from Spain are all larger than life and make for fascinating reading. Simon Bolivar gets the lion's share of attention in most history books, but here you have O'Higgins, whose father was an Irishman who became Viceroy of Peru. You have Lord Cochrane who single-handedly destroyed the Spanish Pacific Fleet mostly though a combination of audacious con games and unlikely assaults. You have San Martin who used every modern military trick in the book to achieve his goals. All in all, the author lists seven men who's efforts liberated a continent.

The book did its job of getting me up to speed about South American independence and also did a good job of probing into the reasons why the American revolution resulted in the United States while South American revolutions wound up with a broken mass of countries that often fell under the heel of dictatorships or were rent by civil war.

Sadly, it wasn't as good at the battles as I would've liked. In part, this was more of an overview so detailed battle sequences weren't given for every conflict. I also suspect there's a paucity of first-hand sources to talk about the battles. So my plans will require a great deal more research.

In the end, I certainly think the book is good for learning more about this time and place. Certainly, the personalities involved are fun to read about.

later
Tom

p.s. San Martin had one of the best quotes in the book. He was writing to his friend about his difficulties in getting support from the Argentine government and he said: "Oh, my friend, what miserable creatures are we, bipeds without feathers!"

Viva la Reviewalation!

Hi,

So, one of the great things about wargamming is that I've actually learned a great deal of history. Yeah, yeah, history is more than a series of battles or kings, but my gaming has often served as a starting point to learn more about a period of history or culture. Certainly my knowledge of the Vietnam was was spotty at best until I started playing Charlie Company and now I feel like I know a heck of a lot more than I did at the end of high school or college.

In that vein, I've been thinking about South America. I don't really know a huge amount about the history of South America. Actually, I know a huge amount about Nazca lines and Incan ceques, but real history? Not so much. It occured to me that probably a lot of people don't know a lot about it either. So I have this idea where I would put together a series of wargames depicting conflicts throughout the history of South America. People could show up and play the games and get a series of glimpses into something they didn't know much about.

Of course, this means I have to learn something about South American history and that's why I picked up Liberators: Latin America's Struggle for Independence by Robert Harvey. Obviously, it covers a bit more than just South America (as Spain owned most of the New World at the time), but South America is the chief focus and that's where much of the action takes place.

As a history it didn't quite have the same pull as a fiction book might and it took me a bit longer to get through it. On the other hand, the various personalities involved in freeing South America from Spain are all larger than life and make for fascinating reading. Simon Bolivar gets the lion's share of attention in most history books, but here you have O'Higgins, whose father was an Irishman who became Viceroy of Peru. You have Lord Cochrane who single-handedly destroyed the Spanish Pacific Fleet mostly though a combination of audacious con games and unlikely assaults. You have San Martin who used every modern military trick in the book to achieve his goals. All in all, the author lists seven men who's efforts liberated a continent.

The book did its job of getting me up to speed about South American independence and also did a good job of probing into the reasons why the American revolution resulted in the United States while South American revolutions wound up with a broken mass of countries that often fell under the heel of dictatorships or were rent by civil war.

Sadly, it wasn't as good at the battles as I would've liked. In part, this was more of an overview so detailed battle sequences weren't given for every conflict. I also suspect there's a paucity of first-hand sources to talk about the battles. So my plans will require a great deal more research.

In the end, I certainly think the book is good for learning more about this time and place. Certainly, the personalities involved are fun to read about.

later
Tom

p.s. San Martin had one of the best quotes in the book. He was writing to his friend about his difficulties in getting support from the Argentine government and he said: "Oh, my friend, what miserable creatures are we, bipeds without feathers!"