Valkyriedagboken

Gissa!

2011-01-31T14:05:00.000+01:00

Han är klar!

.:Technomancer Xavier:.

Tog bara ett halvår, typ. Fan att man blir klar till GothCon i år.Men skall jobba snabbare med de andra. Behöver beställa fler shoulder pads of Iron Warrior uppgraderings kit.

Just det: köpte en Daemon Prince och lite annat smått och gott för en riktigt najs konvertering jag har i verket.

Thousand Son i IW färger

2011-01-03T22:03:00.000+01:00

Fick målat mina Thousand Sons iaf.

Thousand Sons + Asp. Sorcerer by *Belazikkal on deviant ART

Målningsinstruktioner om man följer bildlänken. OBS: Engelska!

Ja'nte död!

2011-01-03T21:51:00.000+01:00

Jag har bara inte haft nån tid alls till att måla. Har inte ens börjat måla min Technomancer. Vad är det med mig?

Har istället målat en Confrontation Wolfen och en hel del "vanliga" målningar. Tror inte att armén blir klar till GothCon faktiskt. Men den är ändå kul att arbeta med.

Uppdatering i tystnaden

2010-07-25T22:46:00.000+02:00

Var mer än en månad sedan jag skrev något här, men jag har inte direkt gjort mycket. Allvarligt talat tappat sugen lite, kan man säga.

Dock vet jag att om jag bara sätter mig ner igen med figurerna så rullar det bara på.

Nollställde min Chaos Sorceror till svart basfärg igen; det blev inte snyggt med NMM. Alls.

Fortsatte också på en Wolfen Sacred Vestal från Confrontation som legat och dammat ett tag. Har ironiskt nog bara NMM kvar på den att göra.

Idioti

2010-06-21T19:14:00.000+02:00

Att försöka måla en Iron Warrior Sorcerer Lord i NMM (Non-Metallic Metal = icke-metallisk metall) när han skall användas i en stridsduglig armé och således inte behöver något glassigare färgschema.

Han ser för jävlig ut. Men jag är en erfarenhet rikare!

Jaja, får se om jag kan fixa detta när jag går vidare med de andra färgerna, men i och med att jag målat själva huvudplåtarna i NMM järn, så måste jag "änna" måla all annan metall med samma teknik. Jag har, som man säger, skitit i det blå skåpet.

Fan också!

Inköp no. 4

2010-06-14T13:49:00.000+02:00

Så, vad har hänt? Inte mycket på målningsfronten. Planerar att åka in till GW Göteborg och sätta mig och måla och snacka skit i veckan, dock. Nåt skall man väl göra på dagarna nu när man är arbetslös?

Gick dock och köpte en packe Tyranid Gargoyles some jag skall rejda för att bygga Raptors med. Har dessutom funderat på konceptet med Chaos Terminators med Lightning Claws gjorda från klorna på Possesssed.

Har också sammanställt en lista med det som behövs köpas till för att göra armén komplett.

Listan kommer här:

1 box med Chaos Space Marines
2 Rhino vagnar till
2 Obliterators
4 Havocs med raketgevär/Missile Launchers
Minst 2 blistrar med Iron Warriors uppgraderingar till
3 packar med Iron Warrior axelskydd, för fy satan vad jag hatar klistermärkena!

Sedan kanske Terminators och en Defiler kommer med av bara farten för att de är coola! :-D

...till ljudet av syrsor

2010-05-26T16:47:00.000+02:00

Inte mycket har hänt här den senaste månaden, för inte mycket har hänt med armén. Illa av mig, jag vet, men jag har fått fokusera på mitt skolarbete och mitt sociala umgängesliv nu i maj.

Om det är nåt, eller snarare någon, som jag alltid kommer sätta först i livet, så är det min pojkvän. Då får allt Warhamrandet stå tillbaka.

Men jag har gjort en ny bild! Så helt icke-kreativ har jag inte varit!

Klicka här för "awesome-sauce"!! Jag varnar för att bilden är JÄTTESTOR!!

Thousand Sons och Sorcerer

2010-04-28T19:49:00.000+02:00

Var ett tag sedan jag skrev nåt, men jag har varit lite upptagen med annat.

Har i alla fall satt ihop samtliga Thousand Sons efter en hel del filande och slipande. Satan för metall och plast blandingsfigurer ibland.

Skall se om jag inte kan få dem grundade imorgon eller nåt.

Har en idé om hur jag skall knyta ihop 1k Sons färgschemat med Iron Warriors.

Chaos Terminators

2010-04-05T21:36:00.002+02:00

Så, blev klar med mina Chaos Terminators. Har påbörjat Chaos Terminator Sorcerer och Thousand Sons.

Här är en bild på Termiesarna och hur de blev målade. Funkade lite som en testbänk för färgschemat för hela armén.

Klicka för att förstora

Silver metall: Tin Bitz drybrush -> Boltgun Metal drybrush -> Badab Black wash ->Chainmail drybrush

Gyllene metall: Tin Bitz drybrush -> Brazen Brass/Dwarven Copper overbrush -> Devlan Mud wash -> Shining Gold

Hazard stripes gult: Skull White base -> Sunburst Yellow -> Skull White extreme highlight

Hazard stripes svart: Chaos Black base/retouch -> Codex Grey extreme highlight

Dödskallar och horn: Bestial Brown base -> Bubonic Brown overbrush -> Bleached Bone overbrush -> Skull White extreme highlight

Linser, trassel and ögon/ädelstenar: Regal Blue base -> Enchanted Blue -> Space Wolves Grey

Hud: Gretchin Green base -> Rotting Flesh overbrush -> Leviathan Purple wash -> Skull White extreme highlight

Temporärt avbrott

2010-03-17T11:22:00.000+01:00

Har inte skrivit i den här bloggen på ett tag. Det har och göra med skolarbete och det enkla faktum att jag inte haft så mycket tid till att jobba med figurerna.

Nå, i alla fall... I och med att jag tänkte använda Possessed Marines i Battalion boxen tillsammans med Termies i plast för att skapa Termies med lightning claws, så finns det i samma låda en binge Khorne Berzerkers som jag inte riktigt vetat vad jag skall ha dem till. Just nu finns det inte nåt rum för närstridsspecialister i min armé. Iron Warriors är inte skygga för närstrid, men de föredrar ju att bomba sönder fienden.

Så jag satt och tänkte på vad jag skulle ha dem till när jag kom på att jag trots allt skall ha totalt 12 Raptors i armén, uppdelat på två enheter om 6 med 2 meltagevär i varje. Problemet är att metall Raptors går loss på 100 kr styck. 1200 kr för två enheter är lite väl dyrt, i min mening ;-)

Så, jag tänkte så här: Jag kommer ha bits nog över efter att jag satt ihop Thousand Sons till att sätta ihop 4 extra marines (och det är aldrig värre än att jag köper en combat squad box om 5 Chaos marines till). Metlagun har jag åtminstone 2. Jag har två backpacks med vingar från Possessed Marines, så jag behöver bara köpa till 10 lösa metallvingar från Harpies i Warhammer och klistra på vanliga backpacks plus lite green stuff för att de skall passa in. Närstridsvapen och bolt pistoler har jag så det räcker och blir över. Samt att om jag sätter ihop dem på det här sättet kan jag ha Iron Warriors skulpterade shoulder pads.

Visst är det kul med Chaos? Man kan hitta lösningar på allt.

Inköp del 3 + färgschema

2010-02-25T15:57:00.000+01:00

Smet förbi GW igen idag. Ja, jag vet, men det ligger så lägligt till emellan Kungsportsplatsen och Centralstationen.
Köpte en packe "basing gravel" för Wh40k, nya eldkastar- och explosionstemplates för mina gamla i papp är borta (troligtvis ligger de i nåt mikroskopiskt svart hål under min säng, men fan vet) samt en stor och en liten dry brush.

Det sistnämnda kom till efter att jag övningsmålat en av mina Terminators häromdagen. Om jag skall basa hela figurer med Tin Bitz och Bolt Gun Metal så behöver jag en stor pensel. En figur får inte ta mer än totalt 2 timmar. Detta betyder att 5 figurer tar runt 10 timmar. Överkomligt, i min mening. En stridsenhet per vecka, om man målar 2 timmar om dagen.

Och, ja, jag kommer lägga upp bilder på den första Termien. Med en lista på färger och hur jag gick tillväga. Men först måste jag fixa bilder. Jag har dessutom en tutorial på Vostroyans att knåpa ihop. Har dragit på det lite länge.

Och mitt i allt detta: Större hemövningsuppgift i GIS-kursen och statistikplugg inför hemtenta i slutet av mars.

Inköp del 2

2010-02-20T13:30:00.000+01:00

Tittade förbi GW Göteborg och lade en beställning på lite bitar som behövs igår.

Det blev en Iron Warriors konverterings kit, 2 packar med Iron Warriors shoulder pads och en fem stycken plasmagevär. Tyvärr finns det inga bitz packs för Chaos, så de sistnämnda är lojalist gevär. Vilket är lite surt av GW att de gjort så.

Hade tänkt titta förbi igen på måndag och köpa Chaos Space Marine battaljonen. Kunde köpt den igår, men är uppe i Trollhättan över helgen och ville inte släpa på mer än jag måste.

Råkade ut för en kul bugg i GWs beställningssystem dock. De vill inte veta av min mejl av någon anledning, vilket ledde till en hel del huvudbry för Niklas, Store Managern. Det gick att lösa, helt klart, men det är en riktigt mysko bugg.

Inspiration kan komma plötsligt

2010-02-16T16:50:00.000+01:00

Det är märkligt hur inspirationen kan komma från de mest oväntade håll.

Den här dagen har inte direkt utmärkts av tjohej och klackarna i taket då begravningen av mormor var idag.

Så kommer man hem, försöker läsa lite i statistikboken (no luck) och börjar bläddra i GWs modellkatalog. Funderar lite över nästa inköp och över specialbitarna man kommer få beställa, främst Iron Warriors shoulder pads.

Då, PANG!

INSPIRATION!

Istället för att köpa en binge lojalist Lightning claws till mina planerade närstrids Termies, så kan jag köpa battleforcen (vill ändå ha Berzerkers och en Rhino) och använda armarna från Possessed Marines som stand-ins för LCs. Tänker ändå inte använda Possessed i arméen då de 1) är lite för oförutsägbara i sina kapaciteter och 2) inte är särskilt Iron Warriorsiga.

Kort och gott, göra två flugor på smällen ;-)

Dags att köpa Battleforce Box! Kommer ändå få beställa extra plasmagevär. Men det är ett hinder mindre!

Lägesuppdatering

2010-02-13T18:55:00.000+01:00

Har inte målat nåt den senaste tiden. Inte ens förberett mycket. Har dock läst på regelboken en del.
Att jag inte målat mycket beror främst på skolan skulle jag tro. Men också på det enkla faktum att jag fått tag på Fallout, Fallout2 och Planescape: Torment. Underbara gamla rollspel som nu släpps i uppdaterad version som funkar i Windows XP och Vista.

Tro inte att mina Iron Warriors blir ignorerade helt dock. Sitter och har lite idéer på en Juggernautridande Lord baserad på mitt internetalias Belashkal. Lightning Claws, Mark of Khrone och Juggernaut. 7 attack vid stormning, med omslag på Skadetabellen (To Wound table) och inga Armour Saves. Mums fillibabba!

Satans snö!

2010-02-02T20:56:00.000+01:00

Sitter fortfarande och väntar på mildare väder. Men icke. Bara mer snö.

Skulle kunna måla på min Vestal, men återupptäckte MyPaint häromdagen. Tänker rita lite Chaos Marines i det när jag är klar med statistikplugget. Första hemtentan börjar på fredag.

"Grönt jox"

2010-01-26T17:56:00.000+01:00

Satt och skulpterade "Kaospilar" idag. Tog en dryg halvtimme.

Det svåraste med Green Stuff är inte så mycket att få det att göra vad man vill. Själva skulpteringsprocessen är enkel. Det som är svårt är att avgöra hur mycket man skall använda. Ju mindre figurerna är, desto värre.

Nu behöver jag bara vänta på lite mildare väder för att kunna spreja dem med svart grundfärg.

Under tiden tänker jag jobba lite på min Wolfen Vestal och teckna digitalt.

Efter Kaos Terminatorerna blir det nog att måla Thousand Sons... eller Kaos Lorden. Behöver köpa en vanlig grupp med Kaos Mariner till för att få ordning på den nuvarande gruppen. Man kan inte beställa Chaos Accessory "spruen" separat längre. Alternativet är att beställa ett set med lojalist plasmagevär och modellera om dem för att passa Kaos.
Vi får se hur jag gör...

Mina stackars fingrar

2010-01-20T19:36:00.000+01:00

Fick putsat klart sju Chaos Terminators häromdagen. I och med att skolan börjat igen, så kommer mindre tid finnas till dessa, men jag kommer inte överge dem helt :-P Skall ju måla också!

Innan dess, puts!

Men allvarligt. Jag tycker om metallfigurer i princip: högre detaljrikedom och det känns, tja, "köttigare" som engelsmännen säger, att hålla en i handen. Det finns mer tyngd än i en plastfigur (nähä, Kapten Självklar?). Men fy fa-an för att putsa bort gjutlinjer och flashing. För att inte nämna att man måste klippa bort bas-tabben för Terminators får inte spelas på de små 25 mm baserna längre, utan måste monteras på 40 mm baser. Det innebär borrning.

Sedan kommer det ju till att de gamla Chaos Terminatorsarna i vissa fall levereras med Chain axes/Kedjeyxor och inte power weapons. WTF? Okay att kedjeyxor var standard på dem i 2nd edition, men det är ju 10 år sedan!
CSM Termies kommer i alla fall alltid med power weapons, ända sedan 3rd editions första CSM Codex. Och eftersom nuvarande utgåva säger att "What You See Is What You Get", så måste kedjeyxorna väck"

Detta löste jag genom att klippa av yxhuvudena och ersätta dem med egna gjorda från plasticard. Dessa fick klippas ut och filas till och borras hål i så de kunde fästas säkert på yxhjaltet.

Bilder kommer.

Men efter allt det här filandet, slipandet och borrandet och limmandet är man rätt trött på dem. Och jag måste fortfarande skulptera på en liten detalj på båda sidor av yxhuvudena för att dölja världens fulaste fog.

Så här känner jag mig just nu:

Puts puts puts

2010-01-17T13:19:00.000+01:00

Så, det första som behöver göras i min armé är i stort sett att hitta ett färgschema som funkar bra, och är relativt enkelt att måla.

Nu skall inte detta vara något större problem: Iron Warriors har ett fastställt färgschema bestående av silverfärgad rustning, med gyllene kanter och svartgula "sparrar" (översta bilden till höger). Egentligen är en sparre en sådan här men det ser inte bra ut på, säg, en benskena. I 28 mm skala.

Men för att vara på den säkra sidan, så tänker jag inte utsätta mina nyligen inhandlade figurer för detta sökande. Hittade en drös med gamla Chaos Terminators i metall som jag köpte av en kompis som inte spelade mer. Efter en thinnerbehandling för att få bort grundfärgen han använt, så är det bara en lättare puts och slipning, samt montering på nya baser, allt som behövs innan målning.

Hur jag går tillväga för att förbereda figurer för målning kan ses i den följande länken:

Del 1 i min Vostroyan Tutorial. På engelska, dock.

Det är en PDF. Bara att ladda ner.

Vilket färgschema det blir kommer jag gå igenom i en senare blogg.

Första inköpet

2010-01-11T12:22:00.000+01:00

Så, då har man kilat ner till GW Göteborg i dagarna och inhandlat det som kommer bli kärnan i armén:

Chaos Lord/Sorcerer i Terminatorrustning i plast.
Thousand Sons trupp med Aspiring Sorcerer
Chaos Space Marine trupp i plast.

Det enda som stör i detta är att CSM truppen bara kommer med ett plasmagevär. Antingen får jag köpa en trupp till och bygga en trupp med meltagevär och en med plasmagevär, eller helt enkelt se om jag kan hitta en lös metallfigur i blister med plasmagevär. En gång i tiden sålde GW dem faktiskt på det viset. Kommer ändå få göra nåt liknande med mina Havocs.

Målade också en gammal gratis-Ork Nob som man fick med en White Dwarf i helgen. Tog kanske ett par timmar max. Resultatet blev riktigt bra. Foundation-färgerna är helsköna att använda.

Upptäckte dock att en av mina gamla Chainmail-pots hade torkat igen. C'est la vie!

Planer och komposition

2010-01-06T11:53:00.000+01:00

Tänkte jag skulle gå igenom ungefär hur min armé ser ut rent planeringsmässigt just nu. I och med 5e utgåvan av 40k, så har Troops mycket högre värde än förut.

Den här listan är högst preliminär, men grundidén är att ha så mycket tungt artilleri som är möjligt, utan at foka för mycket på tanks. Jag har fortfarande beslutsproblem vad gäller mitt HQ val, men jag listar den varianten som jag senast satte samman.
HQ:
Chaos Sorcerer med Mark of Tzeentch, Warp Time, Wind of Chaos, Terminator Armour och Combi-weapon och Force Weapon

Elites:
7 Chosen med 4 flamers, Rhino transport med combi-flamer

Troops:
8 Thousand Sons med Aspiring Sorcerer med Doom Bolt

10 Chaos Space Marines med Icon of Chaos Glory, 2 plasmagevär/Plasma guns och Rhino transport

10 Chaos Space Marines med Icon of Chaos Glory, 2 plasmagevär och Rhino transport.

Fast Attack:
6 Raptors med 2 Meltagevär/Meltaguns

6 Raptors med 2 Meltagevär

Heavy Support:
7 Chaos Havocs med 4 Missile Launchers och Rhino transport

2 Obliterators

Allt detta kommer till ett totalt värde av 1750 poäng. Tyvärr bara 3 Troops/Scoring units och hela 9 Kill points. det kan hända att främst Obbarna blir utbytta mot ytterligare en enhet Chaos Space Marines. Men vi får se. Det som är mest säkert är basen på Chaos Space Marines enheter. Thousand Sons enheten är hård, men sitter lite lösare då den är så dyr (284 poäng!).

Ord ord ord

2010-01-04T11:38:00.000+01:00

Jag tänkte bara lite snabbt gå igenom den nomenklatur jag kommer använda i den här bloggen, då både 40k och Warhammer är engelska spel, och en hel del av orden som används inom den svenska spelscenen bara är svenska varianter på de engelska. Swenglish, med andra ord.

De första jag kommer att använda är storma istället för "charga" och "assaulta". Främst för att de senare ser helt idiotiska ut i skrift och låter ännu mer puckade när man säger dem högt. Jag förstår att de kommer av en direktöversättning av engelskans "to charge" och "to assault" och att man vet vad som menas när de sägs, men de ser och låter ändå helt puckade.
Seriöst, ta ett steg tillbaka och prova. Storma är bättre, då det kan användas i båda spelen. Egentligen är anfalla ännu bättre, när jag tänker efter.

I både Warhammer och 40k använder man arméer och olika armélistor. Inte raser. Punkt.

Jag kommer att välja att ha kvar vapennamn så långt det är möjligt. Bolters förblir bolters. Plasma guns kommer dock refereras till som plasmagevär, men detta tror jag är en ganska vanlig översättning inom det svenska 40k-communytit.

Det samma gåller arméers namn, som Black Templars, Eldar, Orker och Space Marines. De här har en etablerad historia i svenskt Warhammer-spelande. Samt att de funkar.

Jag kommer dock att kalla Space Marine "chapters" för kapitel. Detta är inte bara en direktöversättning. Space Marines är i mångt och mycket krigarmunkar. Black Templars understryker detta ännu mer genom att vara baserade på tempelherreordern. Egentligen vore "domkapitel" en bättre översättning, men men. Vi får se hur klumpig jag tycker termen är. Kapitel kanske blir nåt annat med tiden. Ordern kunde funka, men då krockar det med Inkvisitionen.

Annars är det ganska uppenbara termer: tum istället för "inches", slå tärningar, turer m. m.

Fast, fan vet om inte Järnkrigarna är aningen fräckare än Iron Warriors. ;-)

Nytt år, ny armé

2010-01-03T15:26:00.000+01:00

Så skriver vi 2010 och Games Workshop anser att ett bra nyårslöfte är att starta en ny armé och spela med den. Subtilitet har aldrig varit deras starka sida.

Men det är ett bra förslag i min mening.

Så, den här bloggen, som är en svenskspråkig "fortsättning" på min gamla blogg Valkyrie Diaries, kommer handla om bygget av denna armé, men också annat spelrelaterat.

Armén i fråga är en 1750 poäng Chaos Space Marine armé. Temat kommer vara Iron Warriors och målet är att, i alla fall försöka, vara med i GothCons Wh40k-turnering 2011.

Lite fakta och förklaringar till denna blogg:

Vem är du?
Jag är en ung kvinna på, i dagsläget, 23 år, som har spelat Warhammer Fantasy och Wh40k sedan jag var 11. Det har gått lite i vågor, och jag skulle ljuga om jag sa att jag tyckte mer om spelandet än målandet. Det var figurmålningen som drog mig till hobbyn till att börja med, men spelet som fick mig att stanna kvar, så att säga. Att jag är tjej spelar i sammanhanget ingen roll alls i min mening.

Varför en spelblogg på svenska?
Låt oss vara ärliga med oss själva. Ingen som skriver på nätet gör det för sitt eget höga nöje. Man skriver för att bli läst, kanske få nån kommentar. Skall sanningen fram: det är lättare att göra sig hörd i det svenska spelcommunytit än i det engelskspråkiga. En till Warhammer-relaterad blogg på engelska är bokstavligt talat en piss i havet.

Vad kommer bloggen handla om?
Som nämnts, GWs Wh40k och Warhammer Fantasy spel, men jag kommer också ta upp figurmålning och konverteringar, även gammal hederlig 2-dimensionell konst, då främst med Warhammertema. Jag kommer även skriva recensioner på TV-spel som jag spelat, men de kommer vara betydligt färre än figurbloggarna. I och med att jag har historieintresse, främst Tredje Riket, så kan en och annan blogg om det dyka upp.

Vad hände med den gamla Valkyrie Diaries?
En hel del. Materialet blev spretigt med tiden, då jag inte valde ett klart syfte. Dessutom, efter att ha skrivit ett par inlägg där jag drev med historierevisionister, så attraherade jag en del folk som jag helt enkelt inte ville ha att göra med. Jag tog mig en paus från bloggandet och tänkte över problemet. Alterntiv ett var att fortsätta, men med modererade icke-anonyma kommentarer (nånting jag kommer hålla fast vid här) eller starta en ny blogg med nytt innehåll och klarare syfte. Att jag valde att göra det på svenska har förklarats ovan.

Men jag gillade [valfritt inlägg/inläggsserie] i den gamla bloggen!
Det är nåt jag tänkt över och jag har bestämt att importera de gamla, engelskspråkiga inläggen och ha kvar de som är 1) relavanta för den här bloggen: 2) recensioner: 3) intressanta ur ett vidare perspektiv. Jag har en backupp på hela bloggen, men allt behöver inte läggas upp här. För de som eventuellt länkade till den gamla bloggen är jag ledsen (sorry!), men de länkarna är på väg att dö ut, som en gång dinosaurierna gjorde.

Ayleid ruins (amongst other ruins) make no sense!

2009-11-23T14:35:00.000+01:00

Tv Tropes: Ruins for Ruins Sake

The entire page, and all the examples they put up.

Of particular note this:

Nazi architect Albert Speer developed the "Theory Of Ruin Value", which proposed that monumental arthitecture shouldn't just look good, it should leave a good looking corpse. He borrowed heavily from classical architecture and worked in stone rather than modern materials wheverer possible, with an eye to ensuring that the Third Reich's great buildings would remain symbols of German culture for millenia after they'd been abandoned and fallen into ruin. Possibly the ultimate real life application of this trope.

What has always struck me with ruins in RPGs is how they always, always, strive to look good. Even if it impinges on the plausibilty of them. Like the Ayleid ruins of Oblivion: No wonder the Ayleids disappeared! Their homes are all full of swining blade traps and gemstones that shoot lasers at you if you come too close!
But hot damn do they look good!

Not even going to touch Shadow of the Colossus.

Which one is your favourite?

2009-11-16T20:55:00.000+01:00

Review Corner! This time: Germania by Brendan McNally

I don't know what to call this. Seriously, I don't. Is it an alternate-history spy-thriller or a butt-kicking Jewish psychic revenge-story set in the last day of the Third and Flensburg Reich? I have no clue.

To be honest, it doesn't really matter, as I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it royally, although it took me some time to read. Not that the book is long; only 360 or so pages, but I was getting tired of WW2 stories in general and needed a break.

The story is essentially about four former Jewish child stars, named Ziggy, Sebstian, Manni and Franzi, in the last days of the Third Reich. Yes, you read that rightly. It is about how they, after being separated for more or less 12 years, try to get back together and eke out an existence in the ruins of, in one case in particular, their beloved Germany.

The story seems pretty straightforward, but thanks to the multiple protagonist cast, it gets quite complex quite fast. Add to the fact that we get to see things from some prominent Nazis' perspectives (Speer, Himmler and Dönitz) and things get very complex, but never confusing.

McNally also has a wonderfully clean, uncluttered language, which I put down to him being a journalist and American. In my experience, American journalists all channel Ernst Hemingway to a certain degree. A laudable ambition, in my book.

I have a few minor quibbles though, and I will deal with them here, since people don't come here to hear how good something is, do they?

Firstly: McNally has been bitten by the fly that carries Dan Brown-disease. This disease causes author's to split their chapters into tiny 3-6 page clips that barely count as paragraphs in some ways. I can see the basic idea behind it: to give more "speed" to the writing and give people the chance to finish a chapter before getting off the tram/bus/tube/unicorn to work. The problem is that in some works, like this, it can leave large portions of the book feeling very chopped up. Flow and pacing goes out the door. There is one point in particular, towards to middle of the book, where we get four very short chapters, that would've played better rolled into two larger ones. Or maybe just one very large one, but that is stretching things.

Also, talking about flow and pacing brings me elegantly, sort of, to the next point: Germania is McNally's first novel, and to be honest that shows. A lot.
Case in point is that the later chapters read much better in terms of "feeling" than the earlier ones, and one early chapter in particular comes to mind as being rather flatly written, quite belying the fact that Albert Speer has just escaped from death by a narrow margin thanks to the appearance of Manni Loerber. I never got the feel that Speer was in physical danger, quite apart from the fact that we all know he survived the war. This is what suspension of disbelief is all about, people!
If you can make the audience truly believe, and feel, that a historical character is about to die, you have done things right.
Also, to borrow from Yahtzee, the few physical fights described feel a bit awkward and "flow like a river of bricks". They aren't many, but it is sad when you can say you've read better fight scenes on fanfiction.net, although that was exquisitely well-written fanfiction. About ninjas.
Overall, I missed the feeling of being part of something, that I usually get from reading fiction. I could cut away the "I'm reading a book"-feeling, y'know?

Thirdly: Americans! Use your Imperial system or learn the metric system properly. Don't switch between them. Oh, and there's no fucking chance in Hell that a Kübelwagen could get from Marienschule to Schloß Glücksburg and back on only one (1) litre of gasoline. It's 15 km there and back. You can barely do it with today's engines.

Lastly: McNally has really done his research and his way of writing the historical people, especially the Nazis, comes off as well informed and well-rounded. These people aren't caricatures, with the possible exception of Himmler. Contrary to what people think, Speer isn't my favourite in this book. It's Dönitz. He might at first glance come off as your average die-hard military, but beneath, he has this ironclad sense of duty, which doesn't disintegrate the moment he realises he can go no other way than unconditional surrender. Despite his bull-headedness, I liked him, odd as it might sound.
And this complexity of the historical people, and in some cases antagonists, is a problem. About halfway through the book, I found myself more fascinated with Speer, Dönitz and von Friedeburg than with the Loerber brothers. Something is amiss when you have to think of the main characters as Batman-villains to regain interest in them (Ziggy's Two-face, Franzi is the Riddler, Sebastian the Scarecrow and Manni is the Joker). This probably sounds harsher than it really is, but it is apparently a very common critique of the book. So at least I'm not alone in thinking this.

Let's end on a lighter note than this though. The book does contain one of my favourite lines delivered by any character, ever. And it is of course one of Speer's:
"You have coffee?" which is closely followed by "You still have coffee?"

Oh, and my favourite Loerber brother? Manni. No contest.

Space Marine power armour and me

2009-11-12T11:15:00.000+01:00

It's a love-hate relationship, entirely from my side. I mean, it's fictuous armour; what can it feel?

I love Space Marine power armour, because it is usually quite fun to paint, and the shoulder pads offer nice clean areas to do free-hand designs on.

I hate it for the very same shoulder pads. See, I think it was Jes Goodwin himself who said that power armour was impossible to function due to the configuration of the shoulder pads. It became blatantly obvious on a painting by Adrian Smith in the recently released Space Wolves Codex. You can find plenty examples for yourselves in his gallery though. I can find an online copy of that particular picture, but it practically screams that it doesn't work!

So, this is the reason I hate Space Marine shoulder pads. As soon as you try to draw them at an angle, or make any kind of dynamic pose, the proportions are bound to get screwed in a royal fashion, because ceramite doesn't distort itself the way human flesh does. Heck, even an armoured knight from circa 1350 is easier to draw, and they were practically tin cans.

Consider this one long excuse to go with an upcoming picture of Edmund Charleston. I drew it traditionally, as I wanted more practice with markers, and I wanted an updated look to him as the current picture is nearly 3 years old now (That's the line art originals, not the colouring). He's more badass now, got more "fiddly bits" on his armour to reflect his veteran and commander status, though without getting as detailing heavy as Chaos Armour.
Speaking of which: Kharn is going to get an update too, to tie in with the Lord Kevlinn picture that is getting CGed after A'mon. Almost done with A'mon, but the last bit requires some planning as I have a How-To-video planned there.

Valkyrie Diaries Fanfiction writing guide - Addendum

2009-11-09T15:47:00.000+01:00

Because I'm a Grammar Nazi. That admittedly fails from time to time ::cough::typosinwritingguide::cough::

Taken: You can only incur the curb-stomping RAEG of this Grammar Nazi when attempting to write something that is srs bsns. I usually don't give a shit in chat rooms. Unless I feel like trolling. >:-D

I do apologize for the LOLspeak in this post. Been reading ED all day. Not good for your sanity.

Valkyrie Diaries Guide to Writing Fanfiction: Epilogue

2009-10-29T16:10:00.000+01:00

Please! Listen to Captain Picard! For the love of the Chaos Gods! Please!

Valkyrie Diaries writing guide for fanfiction: part the last (10 and 11)

2009-10-29T11:54:00.000+01:00

Part 10 below the fold

10. Know thy fandom as your pocket inside:
This applies to fanfiction in general and crossovers in particular. There is nothing, I say nothing, more frustrating than beloved characters from a show going out of character just for teh author's convenience in a so-called canon-story. In Alternate Universe storylines, AU for short, I can understand the reason (see People Lie by Nugar in the Naruto directory on fanfiction.net). It's sort of the whole point with AU, innit? Which is why I have a hard time calling AU fanfiction with a straight face. It breaks the first rule about fanfiction, in many ways: write your own stories with someone else's characters and setting.

Either way, going out of character in canon only reveals your own inability to understand the characters your are writing about. This is annoying, nothing else.
case in point: In many Ed, Edd n Eddy fanfics (EEnE for short) on fanfiction.net, Ed is portrayed as downright retarded. Not only is this disrespectful of a dearly beloved character in the fandom, but it is also wrong on so many levels. Ed in the original cartoon, whilst being unable to focus on any one subject for very long, unless it is monster-movies or soemthing else that interests him, still shows moments of clarity and insight that show a normal level of intelligence. If Ed has any mental condition, my guess would be ADD. If you couple this with dyslexia, I'm certain you get Ed. If you have any friend that is like this, use them as a basis for Ed, even if they annoy you.

OOC-behaviour in canon-stories is only matched by authors' unwillingness to "explain" fandoms to potential newcomers in crossovers. You see, crossovers usually require fairly intimate knowledge of two, in somecases more, fandoms, often totally unrelated. This means that not only do you have a narrow band of fans, you also run the risk of alienating fans of only one half of the crossed over fandoms if you as the author refuse to describe in the first few chapters, through showing of course, why the flying smeg these two are being crossed over and what they are. This is why crossover should generally be avoided.

You can appeal to fans of only one half, however, if you do take the first few chapters out to describe the setting and show character personalities through their actions and reactions to the setting. This is why knowing your fandoms are so important. Take for example, my own crossover series The Space Outlaws. In it, bolters, psychics, power armour etc. gets introduced at the same time the Eds encounter them. From EEnE fans' point of view, you can relate to the Eds' reaction to these new things, whilst WH40k-fans know the setting, but get to know the Eds through their actions and reactions. It's corny as hell but this eases the ride for all involved.

11. A final word on language:
This one was born after reading EdBerry Panic!, which for some reason the author has taken down from fanfiction.net. Maybe he read my review of it? Fragile ego, I say.

Either way, I know I have done this myself in Space Outlaws: Iron Men, but do try to keep to the English language when you write if you are writing in English. It is okay to find "Sasuke-kun" in a Naruto-fanfic, but outside manga/anime fandoms it should be avoided. Using suffixes like -kun, -san and even the dreaded "xxxx" no jutsu, is fine, although the jutsu-thing is balancing the line. Why? Because, insert something in Japanese, and no matter how awesome it sounds, most people will have absolutely no idea what that technique does unless you as the author tell them. I can see how "Kage bunshin no jutsu" sounds more exotic and awesome than "Shadow clone technique", but I know which one I understand without a Japanese-English dictionary. It's one thing to as author consult a dictionary or a thesaurus when you're stumped for spelling and words, but I as the reader shouldn't.

Seriously, I've read stories, usually in the manga/anime directory, where the Japanese characters speak in a mash-up of english and Japanese that makes no sense whatsoever, even if you have a smattering of the Asian language. I can only imagine what it must be like for those who know no Japanese at all. To add insult to injury, the grammar often gets really wonky when this is being done. It also becomes unintentionally comical. This is why I slacked off EdBerry Panic! so hard.

Valkyrie Diaries writing gudie for fanfiction: part 9

2009-10-28T12:00:00.000+01:00

9. Humour is serious business:

Nothing is more physically painful to read than forced humour. Trust me on this one. If I had a penny for all the bad 'Allo 'Allo fanfics I have read I would have... a quarter. But still!

Humour should, and must in many ways, flow naturally into the story, through the characters. If it doesn't, it obviously breaks flow. And as timing is the essence of comedy, breaking the flow of the story essentially kicks timing in the 'nads. You as the author must be invisible as far as humour is concerned. This goes double for fanfiction based on comedy-shows like Black Adder, Red Dwarf, most cartoons and so on. It goes without saying, I guess, but there is always going to be dense people out there that need it written on the face.

A better way to go about things rather than just writing something with the goal of being as funny as possible (which incdentially is the reason the Scary Movie movies suck), is to write the story as being serious but where the characters' actions or reactions, either to each other or the setting, lead to humorous consequences. It's harder than it sounds, but this is the core of many Brit-coms. Take the setting of, say, Yes, Minister: It is about a Minister of Parliament and his State Secretary. Doesn't sound so funny, but because of the characteristics and the consequences of the actions and interactions of these people, you get comedy gold. If you have the chance, pick up Yes, Minister and the follow-up series Yes, Prime Minister.

Not everyone is an Eddie Izzard waiting to happen, though. Yet, the sooner you realise your own limitations, the better your fiction will become. As said, don't force humour on people because there must be humour in the fic.
Don't force humour on people. Thw old adage "show, don't tell" applies to humour in writing as well. Nobody laughs at the clown who laughs at his own jokes.

Valkyrie diaries writing guide for fanfiction: part 7 and 8

2009-10-27T12:00:00.000+01:00

7. Plan your work, work your plan:
This is originally a battlefield adage, but it applies to the world of writing as well. If you know where your story is going and how you're going to get there in advance, writing it becomes easier overall. I have seen too many potentially good stories peter out into nothing because the author didn't plan the plot out properly. Not planning it out leads to loose plot threads and sub-plots that never get closure; these things will lead to a lot of disappointment amongst your readers and are known to start wars.

Jokes aside, knowing where you're going is very important. My main complaint about Lord of the Rings is just this: large portions of this epic saga are clear padding, when Tolkien just wrote away, with no clear idea of what was going to happen next. The Tom Bombadil-sequence in particular smacks of this. In anime they talk of filler episodes, which only serve to make watcherse furious: can you imagine what a few chapters of this in a book or in fanfiction can do to your readers?

Having a plan and sticking to it is key, especially when writing a mystery story, which suffer even more than a regular narrative if you have no clue on how to reach the end scene, if that is possible. You see, mysteries are sort of written "backwards", with you as the author having to plan down and most likely write down the central act of crime before writing the rest of the story. You need to plan where clues are dropped and later found; how various characters become involved and how the criminal tries to trick the detective. Essentially, you write the same story, twice. It's just that one of them never gets shown to the public. Agatha Christie's novels featuring Hercule Poirot are particularly good places to start if you want to see this method in action.

What I'm basically saying is that writing a synopsis before setting to work on the actual story is always a good idea. This is the modus operandi of the actual publishing world, where nothing gets done without synopsi. If you have to, write down a short (about a page long) synopsis for every chapter in the story.

And if you don't know where to go with the story, leave it for a bit to mature or alternatively, rewrite it in places. Don't ever let the story meander about like a noodle, just so that you have something to put up on fanfiction.net. If people truly like your story, they'll come back. If they understand writer's block, which can happen to anybody, they'll forgive you for the lack of updates. Fans and author should have a relationship of respect between themselves. Fans who claim you owe them anything aren't fans; they are leeches.

8. Internal consistency and coherency:
All worlds run on an internal logic. And I do mean all worlds. Our own world does (it's called physics); Discworld does (it's called Narrativium). Twilight doesn't, which is why it has been critically panned worldwide. Sorry, Twitards, but the word of SMeyer lacks internal consistency, and once you become aware of these, the suspension of disbelief, which is so important for fiction, goes *poof* in a cloud of vampiric diamond-dust. It's the same with the Dan Brown-novels, come to think of it. And the two last Harry Potter novels as well...

What it all boils down to is to be consistent as an author and to write in a coherent manner. This point walk hand-in-hand with the Grammar-Nazi up there and good old "Show, don't tell". Don't tell the audience that the antagonist is evil, show it through his/her actions. The Hero is heroic through his/her deeds, not words (unless they're a politician).

Also, concerning antagonists, give them more of a reason to be evil than "Because!" or "I want this guy/girl to be EVIL!!". Even the Nazis, who most people will agree were evil smeggers, had reason and logic behind it, although a warped logic. They didn't eat babies, but they certainly killed them. Yet, Nazis were humans, not blood-sucking monsters- Okay, okay, in Hellsing they are both baby-eating and blood-sucking monsters, but that is beside the point. The historical Nazis were human beings like you and me. Wicked human beings, but humans nonetheless. Goering was a fatass, Goebbels a womanizer, Himmler a neurotic hypoconcriac and Hitler had constant stomach problems. Still evil though.

Consistency also spills over into writing style. If you're going to write an epic saga about robots, aliens and gallant heroes in power armour, make certain your writing style is up to it. Nothing can rip you out of the experience as a trivial quote or a flat line of dialogue. I know this from my own experience.
If you're writing a story where the fate of the world, nay the universe, hangs in the balance, you don't want to break this scene with, dare I say it? a childish turn of phrase. Rinoa's entire dialogue in Final Fantasy VIII does this. Every time she says something, you're pulled out the immersive experience, because she acts like a six-year-old.

Either way, these things kill immersion stone dead and can make people stop reading the story altogether.

Valkyrie Diaries writing guide for fanfiction: part 6

2009-10-26T12:00:00.000+01:00

6. Novels are not movies in written form:

This one might not be immediately obvious in this day and age, but if you go back to 19t century literature like Dickens and Stoker, you will notice that the way things are described in a novel differs greatly with how a movie portrays them. With the advent of moving pictures, novel writing in itself changed. Descriptions of what people look like became sparser. Compare that to the rich description Bram Stoker serves us of Count Dracula, seen through the eyes of Jonathan Harker, a solicitor. Today we see characters in books as actors in a movie; we even compare them and see which actor fits best (was Viggo Mortensen such a good choice for Aragorn in Lord of the Rings?). Back in the 19th century, they were seen as people among us.

Furthermore, in a movie you take camera-pans into consideration. In a novel, you don't do this, although you do want the written story to be every bit as gripping as the epic on the silver screen, or rather liquid crystal in todays flat-screen era.
Cameras zoom in and out; even the "inner" human eye can't do that, at least not in the same way, unless we imagine it acting as a camera. What it means for writing is that usually you have to go about describing things in a rather "backwards" manner, in relation to how a movie script would.

As example, I have taken the liberty to re-write the first paragraph of Goodboy's Space Outlaws: Stuck on the Junkyard Planet. Colton's edit.

Original:
“The Rebellion group the, Space Outlaws, are fighting against the evil lord K’vlan to evacuate and free form his rule, a binary solar system’s people, with one dwarf star and two stars that are going to go super nova and collapse into a black hole,” Said a news woman “And here the forces of K’vlan come,” The screen zooms in onto a T.V. which shows on one side ships are staying around a planet and on the other side ships are coming out of a warp hole. “The battle has started now. Now on to you Dallas,”
“Thank you Ja-,”

Re-write á la Belazikkal:
"The Space Outlaw rebellion group, who are fighting against Lord K'vlan to evacuate, and free, from his rule, a binary solar system's people are not only fighting the alien overlord, but also time. The solar system is incredibly unstable, with one dwarf star and two super heavy stars on verge of supernova. Anything can set them off, and once that is over, they will most likely collapse into black holes."
The voice was that of a newsreader woman. She was calm, despite her distressing news.
"The forces of K'vlan are not giving the rebels any leeway though." The small TV screen showing the newslady switches over to show a video uptake of how on one side ships around a planet and being attacked by ships from the other side of the screen, the latter just having arrived out of a warp hole.
"The battle has begun," the newslady states coldly. It is however obvious where her sympathies are. "Now over to you, Dallas."
"Thank you, Ja-"

---

Both versions here are equally readable, yet the latter is written with a novel in mind. The former wants to be a movie script. It should be noted that my re-write does elaborate on some points, something that should be done when writing in novel style.

When it comes to the visual media (comics, cartoons and movies, even video games), the best writing is succinct and punchy. This does not hold equally true for the entirely written media of books. There, you can dwell on inner monologue and pursue more plot threads than in a movie. You can, simply put, add more depth in a novel than a movie, always! This is why Lord of the Rings don't really work half as well as some fans would want them to as movies. This is why the upcoming Atlas Shrugged movie is going to horrifically bad. It's not just the source material; it's the media itself.

Now, to write good description with a lot of information whilst maintaining the flow in them is entirely a practice thing. You won't get there in a day, not even a year. It has taken me 10 years of fanfiction-writing (mainly Space Outlaws) to get where I am now. It also takes a lot of reading.

Getting a dispassionate Beta-reader also does wonders to your writing.

Valkyrie Diaries writing guide for fanfiction: part 5

2009-10-25T12:00:00.000+01:00

5. Past and present tense:

If you choose to write in novel style, a different set of guidelines apply. All dialogue, unless it's internal dialogue (i.e thinking), is written within quotation mark, single or double, just be consistent. Quotes within quotes are dealt by using the other kind of quotation mark; single within a double, and double within single. Also, unless characters are retelling past events, their speech should be direct and thus in present tense. It is possible to deliver speech in an indirect manner, though it does take a lot of flow out of the writing and should more be considered a stylistic choice of some authors. Swedish author and journalist Jan Guillou is fond of this in his novels about Knight Templar Arn Magnusson.
Now descriptions are a slightly more difficult kettle of fish, so this is where people tend to go wrong. They are always, ALWAYS, written in past tense, even if the story is delivered from a first-person perspective (like Dan Abnett's Eisenhorn-novels, for example). Don't write in present tense when describing things in a novel-style story.
Why?
Think of it like this: you are as the author retelling a story with direct quotes from the people involved. They are not likely to say what they said in the past tense.
We can take an example from my own early Space Outlaw stories. It's from An Officer and a Gentle-ED.

Example 1.

What we see next is easy to describe. A hill in the middle of a crop field, and a distant rumbling
sound, that gets closer and closer until....
"YAAHOOO!!!"
"EDDY! Don't you think that you can slow down a bit!?"
A motor-cycle combination, about twice the size of a Harley Davidson (yes, twice), roars over the
hillside. A flame-thrower is mounted on the side-car. Same blue colour on the bike as on the Space
Outlaw armour.

Now, here's how I'd write it today:

Example 2.

The crops spread out for what seemed like an eternity. There were hills scattered about here and there. One particular hill was larger than the others, seemingly surrounded by the smaller hills. In the distance, a low rumbling from an engine could be heard. It came closer and closer until-
"YAHOO!"
"Eddy!" Double Dee screamed as he clung to the side-car of the large motorcycle for dear life. "Do you think you could slow down a bit!?"
The motorcycle was a very large combo-bike. It took the large hill easily and landed with a dull thud. It had the same blue hue as the armour worn by Edd and Eddy. The side-car, in which Double Dee was getting just a little bit bike-sick, sported a pintle-mounted flamethrower.

---

See how Example 1 not only tries to describe in present tense; it also shifts from present to past tense more than once. Imagine reading an entire story (10'000+ words) of that? Ouch!
Now, Example 2 is about as long as Example 1. but flows better and gives us more information of what is happening. Also, Example 1. actually bleeds into what I'll cover next.

Valkyrie Diaries writing guide for fanfiction: part 3 and 4

2009-10-24T12:00:00.000+02:00

3. "Ing-disease":

This is more to be considered a point 2a, but I think it warrants its own entry. This is a grammatical curiosity most common amongst English speakers from the Scandinavian countries, but it is getting pretty common across the globe. It stems, as far as I know, from a desire to put more action into the written words, culminating with the use of the -ing form instead of the past tense. It usually results in literary characters doing a lot of things simultaneously, usually a lot of impossible things. Use the past tense to describe what people are doing, and only use the -ing form in conjunction with the past tense, if other actions take place at the same time as the "master action" in past tense.

Example:
✔ "Officer Crabtree ran up the stairs to the door. As he reached the top he pulled out his revolver and, checking the magazine was loaded, prepared to kick the door in."

✖ "Running up the stairs to the door, Officer Crabtree checked his revolver for bullets and prepared to kick the door in."

Poor Officer Crabtree can't kick a door in if he's busy running, can he? Maybe he's a par cour master, who knows? It looks silly, nonetheless.

4. Writing for the ∫tage:

Script-style stories are quite popular amongst those just setting out writing and it is easy to see why: you (almost) always use the present tense and direct language. But it does have its rules. Or rather; guidelines.
Scripts often leave out descriptions of surroundings save for the barest minimum, for a quite obvious reason. That's the set designer's job, not the playwright's. However, in a fanfic (or other fiction for that matter) this barest minimum of set description can give the reader the feeling that the action is taking place in an empty white void. It can happen to novel-style fics as well, but it is most prevalent in script-styles. So, give some set description beyond, say "Helsingør castle, Denmark".
When writing dialogue, start with the speaking character's name in CAPITALS (first or surname, your choice but be consistent about it!) and then write the dialogue, without quotation marks. If they're delivering their line a very particular fashion, write that out within parentheses after the colon and before the line itself. You should, if possible, use only one word to describe how they say something.
Actions performed as the line is delivered should be similarly treated: one the same line as the dialogue, within parentheses. Whether it comes before or after or even within (!) the line of dialogue depends on the timing of the action.
Action and description independent of dialogue are written as separate paragraphs, in present tense and with no parantheses. Character's names are always capitalised in description, never in spoken dialogue.

Example from Red Dwarf, Episode 1 "The End", Scene 1:

One of the corridors of the Red Dwarf. It is rather cramped. The walls are grey. Rimmer and Lister enter the scene from right. Lister is pushing a cart full of strange gear. Rimmer walks ahead with a clipboard and pen in his hands.

LISTER (singing softly) From Ganymede to Titan, yessir I've been around...

RIMMER (stops) Lister, ever been hit in the head with a welding mallet? (turns around) No? Shut up then! (Continues walking)

LISTER (mockingly) Yessir, Mr. Rimmer, sir! (Pushes cart after RIMMER)

BOTH exit the stage to the front left.

Valkyrie Diaries writing guide for fanfiction: part 1 and 2

2009-10-23T12:00:00.000+02:00

Writing fanfics is fun, isn't it? It's cool to take the characters of your favourite show and put them through an adventure entirely of your own design. Yet, there comes a point when you must ask yourself: am I writing this just for fun, or do I want others to read it and enjoy it as much as I?

After sifting through some fanfiction of late, I figured it time to perhaps write together some advice on how to get an okay fanfic to be truly good. I am doing this as I hate wasted talent, and I don't want to see people have to go through the same trial and error I did when writing fanfics, especially for the Eds, years ago.
I will be using examples from the world of fanfiction for these 11 pieces of advice. My due apologies to Goodboy for using the first paragraph from his Space Outlaws story on point 6.

1. The α and Ω of writing:
Proper punctuation and spelling are key to a successful story. I'm not saying it should be 100 % correct, but you at least give the semblance of having a grasp of the language you're writing in. Most commonly, this is English. A story written entirely in "netspeak" is a chore to read, in which case it will be ignored for something else, even if the punctuation is flawless. Reversely, a story which has good spelling can get overlooked or ignored if the punctuation skills of the author are bad, or even worse, absent.
Don't be afraid to use a dictionary if you do not know how something is spelled. There are plenty of good online dictionaries to use and most Linux distros as well as Mac OS X come pre-installed with one. As I am unfamiliar with Windows, I do not know if it has one built in (WinXP doesn't, though...).
www.dictionary.com is a good place to start if nothing else.
As an example with rather humorous consequences, there is a scene in EdBerry Panic! in which Ed picks up a piece of "ash-fault" to shield against a Draemora's magic missile. The sheer epic scale of the battle is brought down crashing and burning by this one typo. The author could easily have asked his/her English teacher how asphalt is spelled, or just used a synonym: tarmac, blacktop or paving. Even concrete would have done the job.

2. "Ich bin der Grammatik-Nazi!":
Again, 100 % perfection is not absolutely important. As a matter of fact, I think it's impossible with the English language. But the story should at the very least be readable with a minimum of instances in which confusion can arise as to who's doing what. There's a snazzy grammar-word for this which I do not know in English. Preferably, these situations should be non-existant, but nobody's perfect, right?
Either way, if you have trouble with grammar, ask someone who knows better or proper grammar to read the story and point out the grammatical flaws to you. This is important to learn how to do correctly if you wish to become better as a writer. Ideally, ask your English teacher. Their job is to teach you proper grammar and you learn the best when doing something you like.
Sometimes quirky, but not "broken", grammar can be used to portray a certain character's way of speaking. This is not breaking the rules of grammar, rather bending them to suit your characterisation. It is important to know which rules you are bending before you do it, though, so only attempt this if you have a good grasp of grammar.
Two examples of quirky but unbroken grammar that spring to mind are Rolf in EEnE and Yoda in Star Wars episode 5. Yoda's trademark way of speaking parodied itself in Episodes 1 through 3.

Golden Grey-a-thon 2009

2009-09-30T21:16:00.000+02:00

Now this will come off as shooting myself in the face... But I have to get it off my chest.

So, this year's Games Day UK has come and gone and with it the mini-painting contest of mini-painting contests: Golden Demon UK.

I just want to say that this year's winning entries and runners-up showed some fantastically inventive and nice conversions (including but not limited to the Slayer Sword winner), great paintjobs (the Forge World World Eater Terminator springs immediately to mind) and the, to me at least, happy sighting of an old favorite character: Heinrich Kemmler! I said Kemmler!

So, what am I bitching about? Well, it could be that the table-top gaming community, or more specifically the painting part of it, has been struck by the same illness that turns all first-person shooters of today into desaturated lumps entirely made up of anti-alialising, HD-graphics and the two colours grey and brown. I have bitched about this before.

Honestly, I can understand that idea behind it. To bring in some more realism to the mini. Some authenticity. To take off some of the inherent brightness of Citadel Colors and Vallejo Game Colors. But, take a look outside people. Is your world entirely consistent of various shades of grey or brown with a wash of red, blue or green over it?
As it is autumn were I live, I advice anyone on the Northern Hemisphere to go outdoors and find a leafy/decidious tree and look at the autumn-shroud of that tree. See all those beautiful colours?
If you live on the Southern Hemisphere, I advice you to take a look on some flowers in bloom during spring.

Just step away from the computer and do it. I'll wait.

Now, did the world look desaturated and dowdy to you? No? Then why try to mimic something that doesn't exist? There's a difference between realism and jumping on a band-wagon, and a bloody stupid band-wagon at that.
If yes: get your eyes checked. You might be severely colour-blind.

The whole washed-out, dusty colours thing most likely started with a diorama-type entry ("Ork? There are no fething Orks for 50 clicks!") in the new Duel category in... urr, 2004? The painter even admitted to the effect coming from a dodgy can of enamel coat. It was an accident, which caught on, sadly enough.
Note please, that the original piece was a lively, vibrant thing still. The colours got dusty, not washed-out.

But just like the regenerating shield of Halo: Combat Evolved got subverted/perverted into regenerating health by games-developers who wanted to rip off a game-mechanic but failed to understand the very logical idea behind the original, the method and original vision of that diorama was lost on the broader mini-painting community.

Thing is, the idea of using your colours mixed with a little grey (dodgy spray-enamel not being that easy to come by, see) is actually not in and of itself a bad one. I do it from time to time with larger scale models. Matter of fact, I did it for my Wolfen Lonewolf. It made the colours less saturated but the mini nevertheless stayed vibrant in the colours. Spot colours did NOT get this treatment, though.

And that's the thing. On a small scale (1:72 scale or 28mm scale) you need to focus on contrast more than on the larger scales, because if you don't, readibility goes down the bog. On larger scales subtle shading can be employed without risking readability in the mini. You can also add more battle damage without giving the mini a "too busy"-feel.

Remember that World Eater Terminator up there? That was the Bronze winner in the Wh40k Single Miniature category. If you check GW UK's website for the Golden Demon winner 2009, you can see which mini won the Gold in that category.
It's not that it isn't a fantastically well-converted mini, it's just that I find that paintwork absolutely horrid! That mini is NOT easy to read. There is no single easily recognisible spot on it to make my attention stay on it after my attention has been drawn to it by the pose (which is the first thing people notice). I guess it is supposed to represent Mortarion of the Death Guard, but the face is so badly-painted or at least lacks any kind of definition for me to make it out.

What in the flying SMEG was the judges thinking when they gave this mini the Gold for Wh40k Single Miniature?

The paintjob is probably well-done, but I wouldn't know. The mini is hard to read, lacks contrast and is just a generally greyish mess. The green is lacking a contrast colour here: red. A single spot of red would have made this mini so much better.

TL;DR Stop this horrible trend before it spawns more retarded off-shoots!

This bastard has to burn

2009-09-21T12:13:00.000+02:00

EDIT: I received a comment from Hanley himself (not logged in, but I take it on good faith) that he hasn't got anything against fanart as long as people credit him. He also very kindly pointed out that the Teclis one was actually done by Wayne England. I feel stupid for not having noticed...

Still: DeviantART has a strict policy against tracing and copying without crediting the original atrist. And the art contained in the army books are still copyright of Games Workshop Ltd.

Either way, the entry has been edited to suit this new information./EDIT

Okay, I'm for once mad. I mean it! I'm angry.

See, about a year ago, I called out a possible tracer on dA as well as reported the devs in question. Nothing has happen (wow, big surprise!), but the asshole of a copier/tracer still hasn't credited the original artists of his traced work. That's the least the mofo could do!

The artist that has traced is a guy calling himself Aj2207.

And the guys he's been tracing?

Des Hanley! Des motherfucking Hanley and Wayne England (couldn't find an official website...)!

For those not in the know, Des Hanley worked on Games Workshop's design team during 1995 to 1999 and is responsible for the look the elven armies got at the time, the Wood Elves in particular. He's also responsible for the Bretonnian army's realism, and as far as GW artists go, he's one that prefers realism (or stylised realism) over the more stylish fantastical art. Example of the latter is Adrian Smith.

Wayne England I'm not as sure about, but I think he was a freelancer who has worked on an off with GW since the mid-90s. He has also produced a range of cards for Magic the Gathering amongst other fantasy franchises. His style is pretty recognisible (which is why it galls me that I didn't immediately recognise Teclis as his).

You can tell where this is going, right?

What this Aj2207 has done, is trace and/or copy art of Des Hanley and Wayne England. More specifically, three High Elf special characters from the 5th edition Warhammer Fantasy High Elf army supplement.

The problem involved, for me, is:

All art within the Games Workshop publications are copyright to them, and fanart or not, not crediting the original is bad form and against DeviantART's policy. DevART FAQ on tracing and copying art.

But I can post links to the pictures which are clear traces and name the characters traced:

Alarielle, Everqueen
(Scan of Des Hanley's artwork in the High Elves army book)

Belannaer, High Elf Loremaster
(Scan of Des Hanley's artwork in the High Elves army book.)

This isn't Hanley's art but nevertheless:
Teclis, High Elf Mage
(Scan of Wayne England's artwork)

As I said, the damn tit of a TARTlet could at least credit Hanley and England for the originals which he's copied, but NO! I think credit is where credit's due.

Secondly: Games Workshop owns the copyright to the art. There's no mentioning, at all, of Games Workshop Ltd. in Aj2207's Artist's Comemnts.

It's been almost a year since I demanded he'd explain himself, and sorry, but

thnx 4 lookin, but no trace just pratice

doesn't cut it.

Justice shall be served >:)

As a fellow artist I weep... silently...

2009-08-24T22:11:00.000+02:00

If people hadn't figured it out by now, I'm a comic books fan. A dense one, that took a while before she realised what Watchmen were and I grew up on the comics from the mid-90s, what with the Spider-Man Clone Saga (which I liked back then, now I find incredibly silly) and Image Comics' Rob Liefeld.

Needless to say, that last bit has tainted my own drawing style for quite some time, along with the fact that I was more than a bit weaboo between ages 14 to 17. We all act stupid in our teens, amirite?

Seriously though, those interest of mine back in the 90s, as far as comics are concerned, are proving merry Hell to get rid off in my drawing style now. I try to get at a more realistic style, but it still comes out more as a stylised realism than anything else.

This is why I aim to do my research when doing historical portraits of people or characters, say things like Knights Templar and military personnel from WW2.

You can see where this is going, right? I found something I want to bitch about. And I shall, in a bit.

This begins with Jenny Sparks, a Wildstorm/Authority character. I read up on her on Wikipedia, and she seems like a truly engaging character. Intersting character flaws and one of the few decent super heroes to come out of the Dark Age of Comics (i.e. the 1990s). So, no my beef isn't with her.

The beef I have is with the artwork in the mini-series Jenny Sparks: The Secret History of the Authority.
The basic premise of the 5-part mini, now available as TPB, is to retell Jenny's 100 year life through the 20th century. She has a few Mary-Sue qualities, what with Einstein being her godfather, which makes little sense what with Einstein being Jewish and all, but what the heck? I'll roll with it, as she also, whilst in Vienna during her early years, meets Adolf Hitler and advices the wannabe Art College-student to ditch the art and take up politics as he has charisma. That's badass. And probably the only time Hitler listened to a woman's advice. So, still Mary-Sueish behaviour.
The alleged Sue-ishness is all cancelled out by Jenny Sparks being one hard-drinking, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed, promiscious bisexual slut with questionable taste in men, though. So, basically a woman entirely to my taste.

In the mini-series she ends up fighting for the British (she's British-born, see. She often wears a Union Jack-top to emphasize this), and gets caught by those pesky Nazis.

Here's where my art-beef comes into the matter.

Now, I mentioned Hitler up there. Here's a scan of how Hitler is portrayed in the comic:

Here's a link to a photo of the bugger on Wikipedia:

Adolf Hitler portrait courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

Gotta say that's a pretty damn good ref of Hitler, eh? I mean, John McCrea, the artist of JS:TSHotA, had obviously done his research on Hitler, right? Not so hard, what with only going to your local library and look him up in a history book or more likely, as this was written in 2000, search the Internet!

So, no beef here. My beef comes with another panel.

This one:

That's supposed to be Albert Speer, that Nazi up there. But you wouldn't be able to tell, unless for the fact that the comic tells you that.

Jesus H. Christ, where do I start?

Firstly, he's wearing what looks like a Waffen-SS cap, complete with Totenkopf-insignia, rather than the "eyeball" of most German peaked caps of the time.

Secondly, "Speer" is wearing a Wehrmacht coat (I think) with rank-shoulder boards belonging to a General.

Thirdly, he's not wearing any Nazi-party insignia at all! No arm band, nothing!

Fourthly, and what chafes me the most apart from one last item: Why in the flying FUCK is "Speer" wearing an Iron Cross!? Albert Speer was never in the army! He was exempt from military service on the basis of him being Hitler's personal architect. The Iron Cross was a hard, but not rare, medal to achieve. You had to perform bravely in battle to get it.

Finally, what grates me most is, taking into account the rather good portrait-likeness of Hitler earlier, that this guy looks nothing like Albert Speer at all.

Again, Wikipedia comes to my aid:

Albert Speer during a visit to the Atlantic Wall in 1943

Portrait photo of Speer from the late 1930s

I dunno if it's just sloppy reasearch, but it is still rather annoying.

If you do a comic that is set in an alternate history universe, get your fucking sources right and as an artist do your research on what things look like or else history buffs are going to hack your bollocks off! This is why the movie Valkyrie was up for grabs at the Axis History Forum and publicly ridiculed. It got so many things wrong!
I myself take great care in researching my subject when I draw something out of history, be it Nazis or Knights Templar or goddamn Gustavus Adolphus! This is reinforced by my boy-friend Mercareth, who's a bigger history-buff than me, not shirking from critiqueing me when I do something wrong, for which I'm grateful. It works wonders for my art.

Urgh, that was long-winded. I just got agitated over the fact that the overall feel of a good comic can get dragged down by such "minor" mistakes. That, and that it had Speer in it ;-P

EDIT: Also just noticed something else with that panel (it was late when I originally wrote this). "Speer" is suffering from "Young Bloods-disease"™. You can't see his eyes, though the dialogue clearly implies they should be open. WTF McCrea!?

Problems of the modern world: HDMI handshakes

2009-08-17T22:15:00.000+02:00

So, having gotten myself a functioning PSN ID and all, I decided to download some demos for games I've been interested in. The first one was for Batman: Arkham Asylum, and that worked well enough (great game coming!). The next one was for FUEL.

FUEL demo installed. Play game. Screen goes fucking haywire. The colours kinda "inverted". There's no white colour. All white is black and all black, is well, still black. So it's nigh on impossible to see what's going on on screen.

After some fiddling, I manage to exit the game. No manner of sifting through Settings can change this predicament. I pause my Downloads (FFVII was available as DLC) and reboot. Problem remains.
As a side-note: I am so glad I had installed the winter-nature background theme, as the standard theme would've made it impossible to see anything.

What to do? Well, first, I back-up my game-data, in case I have to reformat the HDD. You never know, and I certainly don't want to lose my 40+ game hours of TESIV. LEGO Indy and Assassin's Creed I can replay, no probs. Same with Prince of Persia. But not TESIV characters.

I go online to check for people with similar problems, as Google is my friend.

Found this:

I tried that and lo and behold! I got my screen back. I had to switch the TV off, not just flit between the input devices (tried that). Turn TV off and then back on.

This is what is called an HDMI handshake-issue, apparently. Essentially, the TV and the PS3 don't understand each other and havoc happens. I'm lucky it could be solved this easily.

Still, it's annoying as feth!

NOTE: I have yet to try all my games since this problem occurred. I'm using ver. 2.80 firmware, but that shouldn't be the problem. It was distinctly an HDMI issue, as the box seemed fine otherwise, downloads continued but the colours went crazy.
TESIV seems to be fine now.

Games Day/Golden Demon Chicago bullshit

2009-08-04T15:43:00.000+02:00

I have a bunch of stuff coming up, as I have said, but I'm just going to post one quickie first to highlight what has recently happened at Games Day Chicago ('tis the season of fantastic minis again!).

Apparently three minis that were entered (Warhammer Single, WHFB Monster and Open) and subsequently won those categories, weren't entered by the painter of the miniatures, but by a collector who had bought them off the painter. To make matters worse, the painter seems to have been in on this.

It's stuff like this that practically makes me fume from the ears in a comical display of rage and hate. It's keyboard-banging inducing. It just is one step below bribing the judges. Why oh why do people continue doing this and think they won't be found out?

Dave Taylor puts it succinctly at his blog.

One of the minis concerned.

And it's not like the case of the well-meaning collector who entered one of Aña's minis a few years back. He did so in Aña's name at least. This seems like regular cheating.

On a totally different topic: I have finally gotten round to reading Xenology. I recently bought a mic as well and I am thinking of doing something slightly different as far as reviews are concerned. Essentially make it an audio review. And no, I am not Yahtzee or trying to be: I'll be speaking slower.

A note on photographing miniatures

2009-07-05T18:34:00.000+02:00

As a little warm-up on my intended blogs on mini-painting, or more specifically, colour schemes and what they bring with them, here's a few points on how to photograph your lovely minis. Actually, it more concernes the inevitable digitalization of them.

1. For the love of God/Allah/the Brahmin/Khorne/whoever!: DON'T save as JPG. Why? Because JPGs compress file size by "mixing" adjacent colours to a mid-way approximation, and they get worse the higher the compression value.
I don't have to say why this is a bad idea as far as painstakingly painted minis are concerned. I have seen fantastic minis, blurred practically beyond recognition by JPG-formatting. Sad, really.

2. On that subject: I know CoolMiniorNot.com has a width limitation (as well as a size limit), but it has no length limit to submitted pics.
Use this to your advantage!
If you still have to show HUEG pictures of your free-hand, link in the artist's comments to a Photobucket account or similar, where such size-restrictions aren't imposed.

3. Use a neutral background for your minis. And have good lighting. Preferably day-light bulbs. Curse you EU for forbidding the sales of ordinary damn bulbs from next year! I have to stock up on these now!

4. Macro is your friend! Don't forget to turn this on when photographing minis. Not everybody has access to a fancy system camera (although I am looking at a Canon EOS D40 currently), but most compact cams have a macro function. My current even has a special "Best Pic"-mode for miniature photographing. That's luck!

That's all I can think of at the current. I will now go back to my lizards for a while. You can follow that progress over at my Twitter account.

It doesn't get more WH40k than this

2009-06-22T21:56:00.000+02:00

Ok, not the newest music around, but Bolt Thrower sure knows how to lay down a tune to suit the mood of an army. In this case, the World Eater Chaos Marines. The song is popular outside of WH40k-fandom too. The roar of "WORLD EATER!!!" from the crowd during the concert last time they were in Gothenburg was testament to that.

Grindcore/Death Metal at its finest and most brutal, IMO.

On open-mindedness:

2009-04-04T19:01:00.000+02:00

Picked this up from Orac's Repsectful Insolence (wonderful place!). Answers something that has botehred me a lot in some discussions, especially with my two pet peeves: Intelligent Design-creationism and Holocaust Denial.

Game Review: Tales of Symphonia (GC) - Retrospective

2009-03-21T19:02:00.000+01:00

This is a game I played a LONG while ago, almost four years. It took me around half a year to beat, and I played practically nothing else. The time it took was due to me having school to attend to as well as a social life to maintain, but that is neither here nor there.
So, after freshing up my memory as far as plot and characters are concerned (Thank you GameFaqs!), I sat down and wrote this little retrospective.

Gameplay and controls:

I always deal with the gameplay and controls first, as this is the first thing people will confront, apart from how it looks and the box the game came in, obviously.
And as far as gameplay is concerned, ToS is a great game. The Tales of-series from Namco have this running thing of real-time battles, making it feel more active than any Active Time Battle-system Square ever came up with. It's intense, yet very easy to learn. Mastery comes with time, and you will spend time with this if you intend to see it through. I spent nearly 70 hours or so on it. And I still had a lot to unlock and I skipped most of the side-quests. If the side-quests aren't smoothly implemented in the plot, or if I don't find them interesting enough to pursue, I usually avoid side-quests in J-RPGs, as there is enough to do already.
The battles are played out in real-time and a surprising amount of work has gone into it. This is where controls come in, as they are tight, at least when pulling of the attacks of main character Lloyd, or whoever you choose as party leader. Yes, party. You play real time battles with a party. This calls for a strategy system and puts demand on the AI. And the strategy system is fairly straightforward but with a lot of ways to customise your party's strategy to suit just your playing style. My style is quite agressive, but more defensive styles are possible. But the best bit is that the AI does what it is supposed to do. At least what I want it to do.
There is one problem with the controls though: movement. It feels like I am walking on air. The movement of my characters is too fluid, with no resistance when turning or stopping.

One large portion of how you fight comes from how the characters are "tooled". In western RPGs, how the party's characters turn out is usually left entirely to the player. In J-RPGs, choice is usually more limited. In ToS, there is very little, you as a player, can do to change a character's class. Or more to the point, what stats will change how much when they level up. All characters have predetermined classes, to which a little change can be applied with a title-system as well as T- and S-rings. It gives you some customisation choices, but not the kind someone who has played Neverwinter Nights is used to. Just saying.
Also, what skills, or Technics/Magics, the characters learn is entirely individual, with the characters learning skills at a set level, similar to Pokémons. Again, the T- and S-rings offer something in ways of customisation, but no landslide of change.

Now, all this racking might've frightened people, but rest assured, the gameplay is throuroughly adequate, if not fantastic. It's still a good system. But what really makes me like the gameplay and one reason I saw the game through was the following two points:

- There are no random battles! This alone means a gold star and at least one extra point to ToS. You can actually choose if you want to attack an enemy out on the "overworld" map or not. You can actually choose it in dungeons as well. This is great, meaning that if your group has gotten badly beaten up, you can, most of the time, just avoid confrontations altogether.

- Secondly, healing potions and similar in this game heals a percentage of your health, and not a set number. This goes for spells as well, meaning that cheap, easily learnt healing spells play a part even at a late stage of the game. Some might say this makes it imbalanced, what with the fact that I can go back to my starting village and stock up on cheap healing potions. Well, yeah. Maybe. But at that point in the game, you have access to better potions for a price that doesn't seem out of tune for what you're paying for a less effective one.

Also, I have heard some people complain about long dungeons in this game. If you consider 2 hrs a long dungeon, maybe you shouldn't play RPGs, or at least you haven't played ANY BioWare game.
I found the dungeons varied and fun to play through, as random encounters aren't an issue in this game. The puzzles in them were clever enough and took some brain-usage to get through. More than God of War did, on reflection, and that is a scary thought.

I do have to give the game one last lamp over the head before we leave for the next section, and that is that you have to grind your way to level 5 on your starting characters before you should even attempt the first damn dungeon. There is precious little grind later on in the game (no more than 5-6 hours from what I recall), but being hit with nearly 2 hrs of grind this early can put some people off. It nearly did it for me.

Graphics and sound:

The graphics of ToS are quite nice. Nicely animated cel-shaded characters, with a lot of individuality to each. My main problem would be in that the textures are of rather low resolution, something that became painfully obvious even on my old 14" TV. Also, in some places, it seems like they forgot to texture the backgrounds at all. It's mainly in the Overworld map, but as you will spend a lot of time trekking across it, it can get rather tedious. The dungeons are fine, though.

I know I said the characters were nicely animated, and yes they are. It's just that some of the clothes design makes very little sense, even in the context of the game. What are those leather strap things that flow behind main character Lloyd? What are they good for? Why are they there?
Also, maybe I am amazingly obtuse, but it took me nearly 2 hours to figure out that Genis is a guy. I know it is explained later on why he's so androgynous, but still: he made a good example of ThatGuyWithTheGlasses' "Boy or Girl"-game.

Maybe this is a bad thing, but I barely remember a song from this game. I do remember how greatly satisfying it was to hear when Lloyd's sword hit an enemy. So; forgettable if decent soundtrack and good sound effects? Yeah, I guess so.
The one thing I do recall very well was the downright atrocious voice-acting on behalf of the English voice actors. I just shut the whole damn thing off, and the game became much more enjoyable then. I dunno why games companies insist on doing this: getting D-grade voice actors to do their characters, when that part of the budget can be used to buff up the rest of the gaming experience. I mean, was Baldur's Gate any less epic because it didn't have voice acting? No! Game's that don't have the budget, shoudln't attempt to do voices in this day and age. And sometimes, even games with a budget can suffer... ::cough::FinalFantasy X::cough::

Story and characters:

This is where the game falls through for me... I'll start with the story.

The main problem with the story is that it finds itself in a T-rated game. T is the EU version of PG-13. This means there is no way any difficult or upsetting moral dilemmas are going to enter the story. At least not any that you as a player can affect.
The secondary problem for the story is that it finds itself in the company of the characters of this game, but I am getting to that.

The plot of ToS twists and turns like an angry ball of tagliatelle. I don't want to reveal any serious plot twists here, but there is honestly only one major twist, and that come roundabout 20-30 hrs in. At least before the half-way turn. And you see it coming a mile off!
Without revealing too much of the plot, the story revolves around two (parallell) worlds that share a common "life-source". I have no idea how that is supposed to work from a scientific perspective, but as there is magic and technology co-existing in these worlds, Final Fantasy-style, I don't bother thinking too much about it.
Anyway, when one world is in flow from this life-source, the other one is in ebb. A long time ago, there was balance, but since some time back, there isn't. The mission you get is essentially to stop one world from draining another, at least to begin with.
Now, the whole gist of the two worlds thing would have been awesome, if a some point the game forced you to chose between them; which lives and which dies. But no, this would probably be "off-message", so a piece of Deus ex Machina is thrown in instead.
And it comes in the form of one of the least likable characters I have EVER come across!

Her name is Colette Brunel. She is probably meant to be lovably clutzy and good-naturedly naïve, but she only comes off as a ditzy, dumb blonde.
Now, if there was any fairness to the world, I, as Lloyd Irving, would be able to dump this moron. But there is a little bit of a problem, apart from the obvious one of Lloyd being a couple of cards shy of a complete deck himself, in that the game flaunts one of these "relationship bonds"-malarkey.
The idea is that, if you do some things correctly, you can change the outcome of the game. In one case, even change party make-up. Bleh! I say! Bleh! How the hell you're supposed to figure these out WITHOUT consulting GameFaqs or a printed walkthrough spread across your thighs, I have NO idea. I finished the game without consulting GameFaqs, so I can safely guess I got one of the more "generic" endings. I didn't play it through a second time as I had borrowed the game of a friend and I rarely replay J-RPGs.
I also get the feeling that the changes are so subtle that you actually could do without them. Why give the semblance of impact when there actually isn't one? But my main issue is that you can't figure them out without a walkthrough or a dedication in the game that can't be healthy.

To be honest, I actually tried, oh damn I tried, to get Lloyd and Genis hook up and thus force Genis, the androgynous bastard, out of the closet. Seriously, he has the world's largest man-crush on Lloyd, and it's only after Presea (who happens to be a pink-haired, taciturn tank-character) enters the game at a later stage, that Genis seems to dump Lloyd in favour of his new love. But it didn't help resolve my issue with the relationship-bollocks. Lloyd can't read signs even if he was hit over the head with the Spanner of Gay. Besides, he and Colette practically only have eyes for each other from the start.
Ditzy Blonde and the King of Idiots. Birds of a feather, I guess.

Oh Genis... You're too good for him...

Summary:

The reason I am bringing up Namco's J-RPG for the RPG-deprived GameCube is just that. The GameCube was so deprived from role-playing games that anything would do to satiate the masses, which means that Namco has gotten away lightly as far as serious critque of the game is concerned. The mere fact that the PS2 version of the game passed under most PS2-players radar nicely illustrates what I want to have said.

And that is that the game, although having a very enjoyable "fighting engine" and a plot full of delightful, if corny, twists set in a thought-provoking world(s), doesn't live up to its potential. And I hate when games developers squander potential in games. The game doesn't take the necessary step into truly morally oblique country with its settings. It gives us a glimpse of the moral choices and dilemmas that the characters face, but it doesn't let us affect them and feel the full force of them either. Partially, I think this was out of a fear of a higher ESRB-rating than T for Teen. Also, the plot is dragged down by some of the central characters being, let's be fair, down-right idiots.

In the final analysis of Tales of Symphonia, I have to say that there are issues with the game, something that wasn't immediately obvious for a RPG-deprived GameCube owner like yours truly, issues that only became obvious after a few years playing W-RPGs and other, better, J-RPGs. But despite the last few paragraphs of whining like a broken fan, I enjoyed the game, and would probably still if I opted to replay it.
This is, unlike God of War, a game I like despite its flaws.

Game Review: God of War (PS2)

2009-01-27T20:34:00.000+01:00

Brace yourselves for a tour through Bile-town, as I have some things to get off my chest after playing through God of War. Let's just begin with saying that an alternate title could have been "Overrated and overhyped". Yet, I have to say that GoW is by no means a bad game. But it isn't great either. It's a good game, despite all the horrible things I am about to write about it.

Gameplay and controls:

To start with the controls, I have to say they are fairly responsive and tight. They do what they're supposed to do and little more. Good. One problem I have is that Kratos isn't the gaming worlds' speediest character created and in large battles this can become a serious problem, especially when savaged by three large swamp trolls at the same time.
The combo-system is also fairly intuitive and suitably brutal. There is one combo in which you launch your enemy into the air, jump after him, smack him down to the ground and if you time things well, you can finish off with what I like to call the Mighty Curb-stomp of Doom and send your enemies packing into Hades American History X-style. Very satisfying if hard to pull off.
Jumping is done with the X-button, and Kratos can of course pull off the the gravity defying double-jump, like a Spartan Super Mario-relative. The Circle-button houses the grab-attack, which with larger baddies starts a quick-time button-matching sequence but with smaller ones leads to instant death. Hence why it is sometimes referred to as the "Fuck you"-button. Square and Triangle are quick and heavy attacks with the Chaos Blades respectively. Here's the only problem I find with the controls: the quick attack is bloody useless unless you are facing off against enemies that can only be killed by a certain combo. The power difference is too great! But as said, the combo-system is fairly intuitive and if you string along a long enough rack of merciless and bloody combos, the game rewards you with a load of red experience orbs, which can be used to increase the power of your weapons and magic. Sweet deal, all in all.
There is also a large segment in the middle of the game which is spent underwater, and the controls underwater are fine. They do their job without becoming sloppy, something common in many games (Super Mario 64 was ridiculously hard as soon as you got underwater, as was Zelda: Ocarina of Time.).

That's all I have on controls. Now for the actual gameplay.

I mentioned quick-time button-matching sequences in the controls, and I have to say, that for once, the game that started a shitty fad at least did it well. As mentioned, bigger baddies and bosses have these sequences linked to them at certain times. Pull them off and you perform massive damage. You're not punished too heavily for cocking them up, a clear bonus. In a way, they become interactive cut-scenes. You're always doing SOMETHING in God of War. Putting down the controller is not an option.
And this is a little bit of a problem at times. You might need a pause (loo-break, for example) but the game doesn't offer one unless you're right next to a save-station. True, the larger puzzles are lulls in the rhythm, but the lulls are there to give you some respite to think about how to solve the puzzle, move on and kill more baddies.
Also, it gives you the feeling that you're not playing an action adventure. It feels like I'm playing a brawler on rails, with some puzzles of varying levels of unfair thrown in at intervals. Yes, on rails. The plot-track is not only marked out by a red thread, but by a rail-road track painted day-glow red the length and width of the Trans-Siberian Railway.
The combat is visceral and satisfying enough, but it doesn't feel like I'm accomplishing anything apart from collecting various historical treasures and murdering tons of people (civilians and baddies). I blame this on there only being three actual bosses in the game, counting the final boss (which is a, lo and behold, tiered boss-fight!). Yes, they are humongous, but still; there are too few of them to make the game feel like I'm accomplishing anything until I've actually beaten the final boss. Maybe it is what Sony Entertainment aimed for, but it doesn't fly well with me.

What about the puzzles then? Well, most of them require very little in the way of thinking, whilst others are completely fucked-up out of context, like the Greek letter cube puzzle in the Architect's Tomb. We also have some pure skill-based puzzles, in which success is dependent on how well you time your button clicks and how well you know your moves. Most make sense and are reasonable enough to get through on the first go, depending on how much of a klutz you are. Apart from one, which I'm getting to in a bit.

I also need to mention that GoW plays entirely with a fixed camera. You can't control it. Most of the time, say 95%, it performs outstandingly well. It does exactly what it's supposed to do; gives you the best viewing angle and still manages to present the game in a way to make it look good, artistically speaking. It just works. Apart from a few instances, which are related to the aforementioned unfair puzzles.
Let me just say that none of these puzzles I'm going to mention are exceptionally bad ideas in and of themselves, but combined with a fixed camera, they leave you wondering whether the people of Sony Entertainment suffered from sudden, collective brain haemorrhage.

The first puzzle I will tear a new one is located fairly early on in the game, a few hours, not more. It involves Kratos having to jump around like a chimp, saving the neck of the Oracle of Athens before she plummets to the ground and becomes the world's largest pizza. The problem? It's basically a timed jumping puzzle with fixed camera. You have 66 seconds to get through the course and as with most things GoW, you fuck up, you're dead. Start over. Trust me, it is not fun to accidentially loose your grip around a ledge, five seconds from the end, when you've already done the segment 4 times already. It does not endear me to the game in the slightest! Still, the puzzle is in and of itself not a deal-breaker. Just fucking annoying.

The second puzzle is located in the Challenge of Poseidon and is just plain bad. The fixed camera tries its best to save this, but it can't. Basically, you find yourself in an underwater corridor, viewed from the side, in which there is a fast moving wall dragged along the ground on a chain a intervals. Get caught by the wall, you die and have to start over. There are two ditches in the corridor floor in which you can hide whilst the wall passes over you, but you have to reach them first. I know I said that the underwater control were fair enough, but I didn't say they lent themselves well to precise underwater manoeuvring, even less to precise and fast underwater manoeuvring. The controls don't lend themselves at all to this.
The only way to get through this puzzle is through sheer bloody minded repetition. I went through this in pure trial and error 30 fucking times! Yes, I counted. This is not good game design!! It's just annoying and there to raise my blood pressure. Come to think of it; it does make me connect better with Kratos as a character... But still!

The third puzzle I want to rivet and the one that made me put down the controller and start playing Ookami instead was one three quarters of the way through the game, in the Challenge of Hades. You know that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Indiana Jones has to run away from a huge stone ball? Well, this puzzle is similar, but more bullshitty. Instead of running away, you have to run towards, and instead of one, we have many, MANY balls rolling towards you, in three files. And the balls are on fire. Now, if you thought that all you have to do is play dodge-ball with the Great Balls of Fire and get to the other end of the corridor: WRONG!
That's what I thought too. Turns out, you have to figure out which door is the exit from the corridor out of 8 plain looking doors, which you can't get a good look at to see differences, as the camera doesn't play that game. And you still have to dodge balls of fire.
So, dodging flamey balls of crushing and death and finding a door. Sounds slinky enough, eh? Do I have to mention that the opening of doors in GoW is done through intense R2-button mashing? R2 is not a good button for mashing!
My poor fingers…

Graphics and sound:

Now, GoW is a PlayStation 2 exclusive. Makes sense, created as it was by Sony Entertainment America. And boy howdy have they pushed the ageing lady to her limits. So, the game isn't that long and the bosses are few and far between, but hey! they look awesome, and the world in which this wholesale slaughter takes place is grittier than grit itself. The colours are very washed out, but it doesn't lack colour for that. It doesn't look as if viewed through a used coffee-filter, like most modern games aiming for grit and realism. Also, as you run around on the streets of ancient Athens, you are treated to some modern takes on Doric architecture and that's never bad.

Sound is decent: slashing sounds and satisfying thuds when you thwack your enemies over the head. A lot of semi-sexual grunting on behalf of Kratos, but I can put that aside when the voice-acting that does take place is well performed. I do however have a gripe with that the voice-over in the cut scenes, although having a pleasant enough voice, does mangle some Greek words with "American" pronunciation and as there is no subtitles you can miss information about the plot if you don't pay the aforementioned 100% attention. But who gives a damn about story in God of War?

Story:

Well, I do. And the plot is, despite its mythological tones, very generic when you start picking away at it. It isn't something we already have seen in every game ever made, apart from that there is no princess in the castle at the end. There's an angry War God waiting to pwn your ass if you don't watch it.
It's a revenge story, simply put. Kratos is the unwilling tool of gods, gods acting so far out of the original context that I want to do horrible things to the developers, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
The reason we let Sone Entertainment get away with this is because Kratos as a main character is the epitome of anti-heroism. He's a generally unlikeable fuck-bend! He's a bloodthirsty, raging psycho, who's sheer horribleness becomes some sort of anti-charisma that draws me in like a magnet. I don't sympathise with him the slightest, yet still I feel something other than disgust for the tormented Spartan. He's not very deep, but he still manages to be complex, if that makes any sense. I find myself grudgingly liking the genocidal maniac. Like falling in love with Hitler. Very very strange.

Also, as I said, the game is set in ancient Greece. Being designed as it is by history-less Yanks (Sorry Americans, but amongst people who count their countries histories in millennia, you have nothing!), it does to Greek mythology what I called the Mighty Curb-stomp of Doom. It takes the rich mythology out in the street, goes American History X on it and picks up the brain-matter and rearranges it in patterns that suit the design team and not history-nerds like yours truly. To mention one thing: what the hell is Poseidon's Trident doing the Temple of Pandora? I think Poseidon needs it for more urgent business! Secondly, why would Pallas Athena propose to help a Spartan? Spartans primarily worshipped Ares, the titular God of War, whilst the Athenians worshipped Pallas Athena (No shit, Sherlock!?) and the two fractions were at war with each other for prolonged lengths of time.
I'm gonna go off on a generally whiny tangent here and complain about how primarily American games developers treat Old World mythology as a pick and mix bag of ideas for their games, whenever they run out of imagination. Stop doing it! I have seen my own cultural and mythological heritage, the Vikings and the Aesir sagas, savaged so many times by so many different games developers it isn't even funny anymore. If you're going to use them, at least TRY to respect the source material. Look at Richard Wagner. His Das Ring der Niebelungen pulled heavily from Viking sagas, but he created something decidedly German (and fucked up in parts) by respecting the sources. Is that's so damn hard, you cheezeburger inhaling Yanks!?

I feel better now. Sorry.

Summary:

So, is God of War a good game. Yes, it is. If you look past the three puzzles I lambasted, the slightly unbalanced attacks and the whole-hearted stomp it takes on Greek myth, the game has tight battles, that require you to create attack patterns with enemy priorities and tactics as if you had a brain, fairly difficult puzzles and very nice voice acting, when it does take place.
The game DID start the recent trend/plague of quick-time button-matching sequences, but they are integrated into gameplay and work really well, like interactive cut-scenes.
The story feels a bit truncated, despite its finality, which makes me wonder if Sony Entertainment already had GoW 2 planned out when they started making this game.

Also, the bonus features you unlock once you beat the game are very neat indeed. Why don't more games do this, apart from the generic "New Game +" feature? Oh wait, that's because they filled the PS2 DVD with an actual game!

Format of my Game reviews

2009-01-27T11:57:00.000+01:00

Of all the days to choose to publish this: Holocaust Remembrance Day. Political incorrectness, I am doing it RIGHT!

So, seeing as I am going to review God of War for PS2 in a bit, I felt it was an idea to write down the format I've chosen for my reviews.

It's all fairly simple:

Gameplay and Controls
Self-explanatory. Here I go through the game in itself; how it plays, puzzles and similar. I also go through controls, whether they are responsive or a flaming pile of arse.

Graphics and Sound
How the game looks and sounds. Nothing more, nothing less. Usually rated in relation to its platform.

Story
Also known as "why am I doing this?" or "why am I here?". If there's any kind f mythological creatures and such involved, this will get dissected here.

Summary
Pros and cons served up against each other with a final summation of whether the game was worth the hours it took to get through it.

And I will not give scores! Mostly because I suffer from a severe, life-long case of "cannot be arsed", but also because I think people should read the review and not just glue their eyes to a numerical score. Two games can get the same score on GameSpot from my experience, but have vastly different pros and cons.

This is more as an aid to memory for myself, so pay no attention to it if you don't want to.

The subtle art of miniature sculpture pt. 2

2009-01-22T10:43:00.001+01:00

This is a sort of addendum to the last post, as I have had a think about sculpture in general. And a bit of an epiphany. No angry rant this one.

Now, Games Workshop have these special minis of famous heroes in the Warhammer Fantasy Battles world, that come with scenic bases. They have themselves said that these minis are important because not only do they represent some of the most famous and beloved/hated heroes and villains of WHFB, they also represent entire armies and their "feel".

With no minis is it as obvious as the following two:

Mini painted by Anne Foerster

Painted by Jo Dale

Tyrion is the first one there. Archaon on the bottom.

I think you notice at once were the similarities lie, and where the differences are.

Thing is, Tyrion and Archaon were released at pretty much the same time, which means we can't unequivocally rule out that Gary Morley, who sculpted Tyrion, and Brian Nelson, the mind behind Archaon, didn't work together as far as concepts are concerned. It's a bit of "The chicken and the egg".

Still, I think that, when put together like this, Tyrion and Archaon become two sides of the same coin. They have never met on the battlefield, as far as the fluff is concerned, but they really are different versions of the same theme. And it's not just the rearing horses.

Consider the pose of the characters themselves. True, there are only so many ways to position someone on horseback, but still. There are similarities, especially in how the sword is wielded. And yet, there is a subtle difference at play here:
Tyrion holds his sword, the Sunfang, upright, towards the heavens and seems to be looking back, as if rallying his troops.
Archaon hold his sword, the Slayer of Kings, horizontal and looks down it, as if his mind is already in the combat in which he's about to charge. An all together more aggressive pose.

Then we have the fact that Tyrion isn't holding onto the reins of Malhandir, his steed. He doesn't have to. He is in total control.
Archaon has to hold on to the rein of his Chaos Steed, Dorghar. He isn't in total control. This works to underpin the chaotic nature of the forces that Archaon tries to dominate over through sheer force of will. Archaon doesn't look that Chaos himself, bar the helmet, the sword and the shield, so Nelson used subtle cues like the reins on his steed to communicate it. Archaon is a dominator, so it works.

These two represent their armies (High Elves and Chaos Warriors respectively) very well, but they also represent the two sides that vie for domination in the Warhammer world: Light and Dark. True, in Warhammer, nothing should really be taken for granted and the High Elves are arrogant bastards, but the fact that Tyrion and Archaon are two sides of the same coin still applies.

The subtle art of miniature sculpture

2009-01-21T21:25:00.000+01:00

You might not have realised it, but sculpture, especially miniature sculpture, is a very subtle art indeed. And it is very different from standard sculpturing. And I am here to tell you why. Okay, I do not have any kind of actual education on this subject. All I have is more than 10 years of miniature painting to fall back on.

Here's the thing:
When you sculpt a miniature that is meant to be cast in metal or plastic, packed up and sold unpainted, you must take two things into consideration, apart from making a kick-ass mini, obviously.

Firstly, you have to think about how the miniature "comes apart", as it were. If your mini is going to be cast in one part, fine, skip this, but if it comes in many parts, as a modelling kit or similar, you have to consider positioning on a casting frame and such stuff.

Secondly, as it is going to get painted at some point in its existence, you ahve to consider what I like to call layers. Layers?, you ask. Yes, layers. Like the layers in Photoshop. Upper layers come on top of lower layers (dur!), which means that, as any self-respecting painter knows, the lower ones are the ones you start painting.
It's kind of hard to explain in words, but most of the time, the skin of the mini is the lowest layer, and you start off with that and work your way "out", as it were.
This is pretty much standard; skin lowermost layer, then some clothing close to the body and out.
High Elf Spearmen are text book examples of this!

The skin is the innermost layer, then comes the leather shoes and the wood shaft of the spear. After that, white cloth, scales and finally the trim. Yes, the trim is actually on top of the scales layer.

So, all in all, it is important as a sculptor to take into account how the layers on your lovingly sculpted mini rack up, to make life bearable for the painters that come after.

Why I bring this up? You knew the rant and rage was coming at some point, right? Despair not, here it comes:

I have, as I now have nothing to do except chase grad. work until March, sat down and begun to finish off the belated Vostroyans to TotenVeloren on DevART. The first three (Grenadier, Medic and Vox-officer) were all painted in the same batch, as their layers lined up the same, or at least not too different from each other to be a hazzle for me.

The last three (Colonel, Standard bearer and Commissar) however, do not line up as far as layers are concerned. Not at all. I figured "well, fair enough, I'll just paint 'em one at a time. Only gonna put a minor crimp in the schedule". Heh...
The commissar and colonel have proved easy for my mind to "map out", no probs. It's the standard bearer that makes my gears grind.

Why?

Beacause the damn standard is the lowest layer instead of the skin and hair, and that the standard itself is layered in a very complicated manner. Urgh... It took me a while to wrap my head around it (I'm not a genius, just fairly smart, so I have limitations, you know!) but I think I've cracked it now.
The whole thing was kind of compounded by me not getting along with the standard at all. Don't ask. I don't think I can give a sane-sounding answer to it. But it is related to the fact that I prefer free-hand over painting over someone else's sculpted relief art. It's some trend they have at Citadel right now. Sculpting standard designs. Please stop doing it, for the sanity of decent free-handers around the world. At least give us a choice!

Now this pissed me off...

2009-01-13T18:53:00.000+01:00

Funnily enough, it has nothing to do with religious nuts, although there is plenty reason to be pissed over that right now. Let's just say that my religious nuts-o-meter went bust following the invasion of Gaza.

No, this is more mundane in matter. See, I recently "rediscovered" my Elfwood galleries. I say "rediscovered" as I knew of them all along but I haven't been arsed to check them out. I have been suffering from a severe case of "cannnot be arsed" for quite some time now.
Ah well; after quickly deciding that, as I hadn't uploaded anything new onto Elfwood since 2003, everything there was shit, I proceeded with "cleaning house". This meant removing the horrible pieces of "art" and eventually replacing them with something more original (not very likely, me being who I am).
Here's the thing: Elfwood, unlike DeviantART works on a process of tickets (dA's helpdesk uses this system, however). This ensures a somewhat higher standard of the stuff submitted, avoids mis-categorisations (rampant on dA) and makes any kind of "report for policy violation"-button redundant. In the past, things between me and the mods have been slinky. No probs.

Now, as my last ticket was processed, I received this letter in my e-mail:

"Hi!

This is just a short message from the moderators at Elfwood:

Book illustrations usually belong in SF&F. Only illustrations for Harry Potter books or for books that are based on a visual source (for example anything Star Wars) belong in Fanquarter. Both of these images should be moved to your regular sci-fi/fantasy art gallery.

'Gaunt from Gaunt's Ghosts' It is considered a copyright violation to quote that much of a song. You will have to remove some of the lyrics in the image before it will be accepted at Elfwood. You can limit your quotations to no more than 1 verse. If you'd like viewers to read more than that, you are free to provide a link to the entire lyrics.

Because removing so many images without at least 2 images accepted would leave your gallery with less than the 4 minimum images required, we cannot process your ticket. It has been removed from the queue and no changes will occur to your gallery."

This is, in short, bullshit and I shall address the issue at hand point by point.

First off, I'm going to show the pictures it concerns (this was for FanQuarter, Elfwood's special area for FanArt):

Ibram Gaunt from Gaunt's Ghosts by Dan Abnett

The Guns of Tanith - Psycho Man Cuu

Now, the first issue they seemed to have, was that I listed them as book illustrations, or something. Look, there has been comics of the Ghosts, as there have been movies of Harry Potter (which I think is the main reason Harry Potter fanart is accepted). They have appeared in a visual media. Hell, there's even miniatures of 'em available from Games Workshop! Why does Harry get this special treatment in FanQuarter? I can accept that it is to stem the flood of stupid on Elfwood, but still! I don't want to put non-original work of mine, stuff I consider fanart, in my main Sci-Fi/Fantasy gallery. That's what FanQuarter is for! Right?

Second issue: So, now qouting more than one (1) verse of a song is a copyright violation? Let me answer that with an "eeerrrrr, WTF!?". For the record, the whole "linking to a site with lyrics" kind of goes against the whole copyright claim, does it not? See, if I had just linked the lyrics from, say, DarkLyrics(dot)com, everything would've been slinky, eh? But what difference does it make?
There are many problems with this statement from Elfwood's mods.

1. There is something called fair use. I do not do these pictures with profit in mind, it is for sheer fun and I do cite the fact that the lyrics where from Black Sabbath's Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. I cite the creators of the song and give due credit. Where is the proverbial beef?

2. Black Sabbath didn't construct songs in the boring old "verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus" fashion. Sabbath Blood Sabbath has no clear verses and no chorus at all. This is inherent in many, MANY of their songs and is rampant in modern Doom Metal. How the fuck can you apply verses to something like this? It's like asking for the chorus line in a Wagner Opera. Idiotic.

3. This is the point where it becomes pure, undiluted bull on behalf of Elfwood. I already submitted a picture to FanQ that is built up in the same way as the new one!!

"Iron man" from First & Only

Yeah, taken, they're both fucking old by now (from 2004 and 2003 respectively) but still! But the overall layout was the same to them. Something from the books, illustrated by me and with Black Sabbath lyrics in the picture to illustrate what was going on, in a weirdly unpoetic manner.

Wow... that was long winded... I'm gonna round off with another scream of BULL SHIT! and the follwing

This is equal amounts of cute and sad---

2009-01-05T22:09:00.000+01:00

The bird is cute, in all its meta-humour.

The owner is sad, in many different ways, for teaching his bird the Final Fantasy Chocobo theme.

And it's not just the Chocobo theme... Let it play out to the end, you'll see.

A mission statement of sorts:

2008-12-16T10:02:00.000+01:00

To piss creepy fanboys off.

Well, of sorts, I say.

Why this all of a sudden, and what fanboys (and a few girls, no doubt)?

Well, I rediscovered my old Gamespot account that I created a few years back and decided if there was any place I could make my voice (sort of) heard when reviewing games, that'd be the place. See, members are allowed to make reviews too, which is nice. I'll of course put reviews up here as well, without obnoxius 1-10 score and with incoherent swearing, as the Gamespot ones will have to be PG-13 if nothing else.

So, what is it with the fanboy trolling then?

Well, I DO have a reviewer's integrity in that my statements must be supported either by examples from the games or a logic reasoning. I can't just troll for the sake of trolling, right? And what have I in mind? Well, over-rated games in general and Final Fantasy in particular.
The problem lies in that I have only played a few of them and I'll be buggered to invest more than 10€ in any FF-game, considering what my opinion of most J-RPGs usually is.

To anyone who's on the verge of screaming: "But that means you aren't being objective! You hate Final Fantasy, you meanie!"
For the record, I don't hate Final Fantasy. I don't even hate the fans, as they just creep me out. But know that all reviews are essentially the subjective opinion of the reviewer who's arguments are supported by facts taken from how the game plays, behaves and what plot there is. The basic compenents of a game: game system, graphics, sound, story and control (objectively measurable things) play into the final (subjective) opinion of the reviewer(s). And let me tell you, a professional reviewer's opinion is still going to be a hell of a lot more objective than a fanboy's opinion.
Oh, and when even fanboys want to crucify a game with blunt nails (:cough:ShadowthHedgehog:cough:) you know you are in for a massive pile of shit.
Speaking of the Sonic franchise and fans, I have never come across a bunch of more hopeless optimists who at the same time has a good distance to their own fandom, i.e pretty used to disappointment by now. But then again, ours was a NES-household so I never got that acquianted with the blue Erinaceomorph (Latin joke!), so I might be talking out of my ass here.

So, what is it with Final Fantasy then? What bugs me so?

The following points:

- Final Fantasy 7 is a seriously over-rated game! The plot suffers from "kudzu-syndrome", a term sci-fi writers/readers are familiar with. I know I plunked Lord of the Rings for having a plot that seemed made up as it went along (incidentially, it was, but Tolkien fans will never admit it!), but FF7 is an even better example of this. So much of the plot is redundant and can safely be omitted, unless Square was planning already then on releasing the mountain of spin-offs they have today, many not even seen in the West yet. That's just mean, you know. And arrogant. Don't forget arrogant. Still, it is a good game. Not great, but good. Worth playing for no other reason than that it changed how games were perceived and made.
But be warned, the plot is a "kudzu-plot". It doesn't make much sense. And AVALANCHE are the worst environmentalists I have ever seen...

-Final Fantasy 8... damn, where do I begin? Maybe I should let Spoony and VonFiedler do it for me?
This was my first FF experience, and let's just say that junctioning cannot be understood by a twelve-year-old Swede, with English as second-language. I just wanted to play the game. To have to sit through a horribly abstract junctioning tutorial was not my definition of fun. Even so, as I look back now, ten years later, FF8 is still a massive pile of horse-shit. I can't sympathise with emo git Squall, Zell and Selphie are just batshit insane ans Zeifer... er... least menacin bad-guy ever, anyone?
And I won't even get into how broken the damn battle-system is once you figure out junctioning.
Horse-shit.. yeah, that sums FF8 up very well.

-Final Fantasy X or 10. This is a game I have yet to fully acquiant myself with, but as said, I am not prepared to cough up nearly 20€ for the platinum ed. and then play this. What pisses me off with it? That they had a brilliant system such as the Sphere skill grid that had a lot of potential to make the game fucking brilliant, and blow it all away by allowing characters to "invade" each others' skill areas, by-passing any semblance of strategy. You can turn Lulu, a black mage, into a close combat monster, should you want to? I mean, what the fuck?
Also, Gamespot's review of the game features this lovely qoute:

"Much of the game consists of your having to watch lengthy noninteractive story sequences, in which the game's plot gradually unravels in the conversations between Final Fantasy X's protagonists."

Stuff like that only puts me off a game. I know the Japanese have a very different take on the whole "role-playing game"-thing, but I still think the keyword is "game" here; the G in RPG. Also, note "playing", an active verb if there ever was one.
Okay, so the plot in FF10 is epic, but the thing is the voice-acting, which can't be turned off, is fucking atrocious. Just search YouTube for "FFX laughing scene" or "FFX final boss fight" to see what I mean.
And that's not going into the rather creepy character models, who seem to be smiling, all the time, as if they'd been blasted by a puff of Smilex gas (Batman joke!). It's fucking creepy. "Tidus, the world's about to end; will you stop fucking smiling, you twat!"
Explain to me, again, why I should blow 20€ on this, when I already see stuff I will hate with the game, after reading a Gamespot review (that was very positive, mind you) and a quick YouTube search?
Oh yeah; cherished reviwer integrity. Fuck.

-Final Fantasy 12 is actually one that has gotten some stick, even from fans, but I think it is because the skill system doesn't allow you to do anything until you have a skill for it, especially sword fighting. Let me tell you a thing as far as sword fighting is concerned: unless you have training in it, you won't be able to hit the broad side of a barn with a longsword. So, having to train/buy a skill in FF12 is actually closer to reality than one might think.
Also, there are no random battles. Gold star!
So, end of days, I think that FF12 is a game I might invest in some day. At least I'll do that before I buy FF10.

So, there you have it. I know some fanboys will want to kill me with big sticks for even daring to go against their opinions on games, but this is my opinions. Not really reviews, as I haven't supported my claims enough, but I think the point comes across anyway.

Anyway, my first review over at Gamespot, and here, will be of God of War. I started playing that in March 2008 and I have still to finish it, as months pass without me playing games.
SHAME ON ME!
I'll rectify that sin during Christmas break, so don't worry.

A Retrospective on The Sabbat Worlds Crusade background book

2008-11-05T15:43:00.000+01:00

The reason I am writing up this retrospective on a couple of years old Black Library background book is that I have Xenology on my reading list, and I aim to review it from a Biologists point of view. To do that, however, I have to get my hand back in on reviewing shit. I also write this BEFORE watching this week's episode of Zero Punctuation, as I don't want to be "Yahtzee-fied".

So let's kick off, shall we?

Content and Writing

Ah, who am I kidding? It's Dan Abnett! The same Abnett that wrote the Eisenhorn trilogy and the Ravenor books. The mind behind the awesome Darkblade and Titan comics. And of course the whole Gaunt's Ghosts sequence, which takes place during the Sabbat Worlds Crusade.

Abnett, even at his worst (:cough:TheArmourofContempt:cough:) is still above the average Black Library writer, as far as I am concerned. His worst is still good. Abnett is the only Black Libary author that consistently delivers good stuff.

The Sabbat Worlds Crusade is no exception just because it's a background, or "fluff", book. If anything, it puts the Ghosts into a larger context that just makes it work so much better. It gives you better overview of everything taking place and prevents carpal tunnel syndrome.

The Art

This is after all a Black Library product. To not comment on the art would be rude. It is such a focal part of it, anyway.

There is only this little problem: there are more 'shoops than art. Especially 'shoops of historical people, and one device (getting to that), that a history nerd such as me are bound to recognize and want to place.

But first, the art. As in any BL or Games Wokrshop product, this is, as can be expected top-notch. It is also full of the dark imagery of Warhammer 40'000 that we all know and love. Yet, it still maintains that impish gleam and under current of juxta-positioned humour so typical of the game. If you do not know what I mean, look up page 50 in the book. It's a full page spread portrait of Warmaster Macaroth. He looks uncannily alike a certain French emperor who's last names rhymes with "Bones apart".

However, I can't go any further into the art without first dealing with the various 'shoops in the book. They annoy me for various reasons. Not that I consider them lazy (except one, I am getting to it), no it's not that. Most of them are well-made and add to the atmosphere of "authenticity". Though, at times the perceived authenticity in this books 'shoops feel like the authenticity of the Japano-English mish-mash in EdBerry Panic!, just more palatable. I mean, thought you could sneak that barely edited picture of a bombed out German city from WW2, past me, did you?
It's just that I find 'shoops bloody stupid when you have a collection of fantastic artists, such as Karl Kopinski and Des Hanley. Use them to their full extent, goddammit!!

What does annoy me really much with the 'shoops are the character portraits. They are, incidentially of famous historical people, or generals. I counted to two American presidents amongst those 'shooped: Ulysses S. Grant and Theodore Roosevelt. At least the "photo" of Tactician Antonid Biota on page 8 strongly resembles a young Teddy Roosevelt. And then there's Hector Dravere. I am not certain whether he's respresented by Paul von Hindenburg or Karl von Bülow, but it is most definetely a German general of the Reichswehr, not later than 1918. Narrows it down to a few hundred...

Though, even if this IS annoying, it is still kinda fun trying to recognize who they've 'shooped. It becomes a game of Cluedo, sort of.

The one thing that almost, I say almost, made me want to write off the whole book as a hack-job, as far as the art direction was concerned, was the photoshopped Enigma machine.

*facepalms*

Sadly, I haven't found a picture of it on the 'Net, but it's at the bottom of page 38. Take a look yourselves, if you have it and compare to the German/Nazi Enigma up there. Uncanny, eh? And dumb.

With all this unusual and uncharacteristic fail on behalf of the art direction, I was prepared to write off the book as a bad investment, despite Mr. Abnett's usual top-notch writing. Until I got to page 93, anyway.

If you have the book, look it up. Otherwise, here's a low-res scan of it.
That one Karl Kopinski piece (I'm pretty certain it's Kopinski) makes me forget all the Photoshop-fail in the rest of the book. That one piece of art epitomizes everything that is Chaos. It is dark and morbid, verging on the surreal. It is a total mood setter. It is a deeply unsettling piece of art.

And I love it. Yes, I do. Kopinski has done a spectacular job with it. He has sat down and thought about Anakwanar Sek, who's "voice drowns out all others", and drawn from that tagline. Brilliant.

Then I turn the page and is met by a wonderful Wayne England full-page drawing of a Son of Sek, that although being drawn by an artist with a very different style from Kopinski's, still has produced something that ties is very nicely with Anakwanar Sek's portrait. It's in the fine details.

Those two make me forget the Enigma-shoop, if just for a while. They make the book worth the money I spent on it, anyway. Abnett's writing is good, but not good enough to save shoddy photo-manipulations from getting a sound spanking.

Conclusion

The Sabbat Worlds Crusade is a background book that expands and adds to the story of the Tanith Ghosts. It isn't essential, but it helps giving you a broader picture of what's going on.
My only gripe is that, for this being a pet-project of Dan Abnett, not that much soul has gone into the art, in particular the photo-manipulations, which make up more than 70% of the picture content. Luckily, two of GW's best artists save it from a complete belly-landing with two excellent pieces of art at the end of the book.
It's just sad that the whole book can't meet this level of skill.

He has a good point...

2008-10-16T19:20:00.000+02:00

For all his dong jokes in Zero Punctuation, Ben Croshaw's first foray into mainstream media rams home a very good point.

Just wanted to say that.

Making fun of Nazis pt. 2

2008-09-22T23:08:00.000+02:00

I know what I am suposed to do with my own blog, thank you very much, but when I stumbled upon the following picture, I couldn't resist adding a caption, or rather a text, as it's late and I can't be arsed to open GIMP to meddle with the damn thing.

Reichsminister Speer, during an inspection trip in France, visits a summer camp for midgets.

Smeg knows if this'll be as funny tomorrow morning, but it's funny as hell as of 11 pm, September 22nd, 2008.

EDIT as of Sept. 23rd, 2008. 7.30 PM Nope, still as funny to me. And I've decided to skip on the "Why I am an atheist" blog as it shouldn't really matter. And the other two blogs I want to write are going to be link heavy. Oy vey...

The Prize for Gayest Pose 1937 goes to...

2008-09-10T23:07:00.000+02:00

Now, to get down to the chase fast and easy, I am one of the fiercest advocates that the best way to prevent National Socialism aka Nazism from ever rising to power again is by making fun of the hapless pillocks.

It's just that, some people don't understand that humour is in fact serious business. It is. Nothing gets me so riled as lazy jokes. Push-button jokes, you could call them. They usually involve some type of body-function and/or poking fun at people who know better. As if the underdog somehow has a God-given right to pull unfunny push-button jokes out of his arse.

Never is this truer than in the case of the Nazis. And the push-button joke in question is that the easiest way of making them seem silly is not to play on their hyper-organisation or overly bureaucratic manner (something that could work on any modern wel-fare state incidentially, but I digress). What seems to be the easiest way to mock the brown-shirts, who were so openly machismo and mysogynist? You've already guessed it, no doubt.

By making it look like they all liked it hard in the bum from hairy men.

I don't like this for several reasons.

The first is the most obvious: it is so incredibly disrespectful of the male (and to a certain extent female) homosexual community. Why is being gay considered an insult? Or rather, is it still? This is the 21st century, people. Calling someone gay is not a viable insult anymore, at least not in an enlightened and intellectual society.

The second is that it is lazy, because it only reiterates a joke that Mel Brooks did in the 1968 (!) film The Producers, in which the Nazis played back seat to the actual plot and the homo-vibes only comes from "L.S.D"'s somewhat... flipped-out rendition of the Fuehrer.

Thirdly, it has little relevance with ezisting facts. Okay, quite a few prominent Nazis were gay themselves (Ernst Röhm, Walther Funk, Rudolf Hess... jury's still out on Reinhard Heydrich) but there are precious little but rumours pertaining to Hitler being anything but heterosexual. I heard one rumour that Hitler supposedly was slut-boy in the trenches of WW1, but then again, there are also rumours of him having "deflowered" Henrietta Hoffmann (the Hoffmann's and Hitler were Catholic), thus striking a deal with her father Heinrich Hoffmann, that Henrietta would marry the allegiedly homosexual Baldur von Schirach in exchange for Herr Hoffmann becoming "court photographer". But these are nothing but rumours. There are no proof either way. Hell, Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstaengl even claimed Hitler was such an egomaniac that he couldn't have sex at all, effectively making him asexual.

But, it is hard to say there must be other ways to make fun of the bastards and at the same time refute the "gay Hitler" hypothesis when you see pictures like this one:

Oh I say!

(This picture is wildly out of context, but I did it for the lulz.)

Imagine what you can do with an image editor, Impact font and some crappy English (LOLspeak)... I can has world-war? or LOLNazis. The possibilities are endless.

And remember; stay clear of the gay-jokes. Then you'll do fine.

On a side note: I'm feeling better now. And the LHC did not destroy the world. I think the Earth is a bit more solidly built than to fall apart when two mosquitoes smack into each other. Yes, mosquitoes, because that is the amount of energy that the protons will be smacked into each other with, once collisions get under way.

Fanfiction Corner: TES: Edberry Panic! (first impressions)

2008-08-11T19:20:00.000+02:00

I have had this on my To-Do list for a long while now; nearly half a year since I promised the author of this to write a review of it. I warned him of my slightly psychotic manner of reviewing things and that I would not beat about the bush if I saw something that affronted my sensibilities. Seemed to agree to that. So here goes.

The Elder Scrolls: EdBerry Panic!

The Story
There is a very good reason this is listed as "First Impressions" rather than the whole review I promised so light heartedly. Why? Because I couldn't even finish the first chapter! The story never gripped me, I was in a complete state of non-grippedness all the time!

Let me briefly talk about immersion in story-lines. Immersion is what happens when you openly weep at the death of a cherished character in Gaunt's Ghosts. Immersion is when you feel the haunting feeling of the ring-curse in Ring. Immersion is when you sit and chew your fingernails into bloody stumps when reading something from the Cthulhu mythos. Needless to say, Edberry Panic! doesn't do this to me, in any way. Maybe it is because I am not familiar with on of the ingredients for the cross-over: the anime Strawberry Panic! ? I doubt it. Why? Because my own Space Outlaw stories have gripped people who have had no knowledge of Warhammer 40'000 to such an extent that they took up playing the table-top wargame! I have this on record! (Link valid as of 11th August 2008) So, the lack of grippedness is not due to not knowing more about Strawberry Panic! than that it is a seinen-manga/anime with a lot of yuri in it.

No, I think the non-grippedness stems from the story being so generic I already know it before the introductory exposition is over with. This is also a triple-way cross-over. According to the, by now for some contrived reason, mandatory blog-like (yet entirely unnecessary) introduction from the author, this is a three-way cross-over with Ed, Edd n Eddy, Strawberry Panic and The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind. It was the Eds bits and the Elder Scrolls promise that made me want to read it to begin with. I'll get into this later.

Anyway, the story: Many centuries ago there was some generically evil demons things in Japan (of all places!) trying to take over the world because they were evil, but some good people came out of nowhere and defeated the horrible demons which now are back for another go. Girls are girly and men are manly and nothing shifts the status quo of insipid gender roles. That's what I got of the story as far as I managed to read, but I think I can take a clever (or not!) guess at how this all ends. Now, I don't expect a work on par with Fyodor Dostoyevshky's prison diaries every time I read something, especially not at FanFiction.net, but you can at least try not to write something that has already been written umpteen times before? Oh, and it is never stated why the evil demons do this. Because they are evil, I guess! This brings me flawlessly to my whole resentment of seeing gods and demons and other clearly supernatural beings as fact, without giving any kind of plausible reason to where they came from. Even in the Space Outlaws, demons have at least a pseudo-scientific origin (warp-matter given shape by human nightmares). But then again, this is meant to be read as Fantasy, so I can dig it. Apart from that the demons have no really good reason to kill humans, apart from being evil. And considering mortals vermin? Come on! That is old hat even in such a cliché-filled genre as Fantasy. Give me something that shows that you at least put minimal brain-activity in creating the setting!

What more? Oh, yes. From the Eds point of view, this is some seven years into the future. Now, the author of this would have you believe only three years have passed. This doesn't hold up, as I have distinct memory from the first Earth2Edd forums that existed, on which Mike Kubat (one of the script-writers for the first series of Ed, Edd n Eddy) posted a list on the characters ages. The Eds were listed at 12 years old, Jonny 2x4 at 10, Kevin at 13 as well as Nazz, Rolf at 14 and Sarah (Ed's sister) at 7 or 8. In the story she is 14. Hence, more than three years must have passed.

Also, in the first chapter, Ed has an amazingly long and complicatedly described fight with a daedra-thing. At least I think it is a daedra, as the allusion to daedra is the only trace I find of the Elder Scrolls' presence in this cross-over mess. Anyway, the fight is long and show-cases what the next section will go into; the language used. But first I want to rant what actually takes place in this first fight.
Apart from it being ridiculously long, Ed pulls out some powers I don't think any human being is capable of doing, for the sheer reason it violates the laws of physics! The first thing that made me go "what the crikey?" was that Ed appeared to have sword proof fore-arms. Now, a demon, leaving aside that they don't exist, would have an inhuman strength behind their blows to start with (being inhuman), the sword was most likely not so blunt. In fact, I think even a demon warrior would look after his weapon so that it would be nice and sharp. Simple common sense says that Ed's arms would be chopped off readily enough if a demon lunged at him with a sword and the idiot chose to block with his bare arms!
Now, a few paragraphs down, as the fight is somewhere around 8 paragraphs of extremely detailed close-combat in unnecessarily long sentences, Ed pulls out jumping powers that would put current World Record Holder at the High Jump, Javier Sotomayor, to shame. And Ed does it without a run-up. And this is the point where the author all of a sudden decides that writing what Ed does is too much bother and reverts to the typical animu-method of just writing the cool name of the "attack" out instead of telling people what is going on.

Writing and language
The first thing that strikes me, in the first sentence of this train-wreck, is the constant shifting between two temporal forms in the verbs. No, I am not being a Grammar Nazi. According to the author's ID, he (I assume it's a he, because of Strawberry Panic! What a corny name that is!) is living in the USA, so I assume he was raised with the English language. This means there is no excuse, whatsoever, to constantly shift between present and past forms. As a matter of fact, it is a bloody nuisance! Sir, your English teacher deserves to die a thousand horrible deaths for letting you get away with language this vile! Okay, so I AM a Grammar Nazi! But fact still stands, doing this, when you are an English speaker by birth... Oscar Wilde turns in his grave!

Also, learn to punctuate properly. Some of it is just plain weird, like the commas out on a field trip at one point. And the periods just disappear at times. They just smegging disappear!

Secondly, it is spelled "asphalt", not "ash fault". This took me thirty seconds to check on an online dictionary, or even better, the built-in one in Linux or Mac OS X. Even Microsoft Word comes with one! Not that hard to check if you are in doubt over its spelling. Even better; if you can't deign yourself to use a dictionary (they come as brick-like books too, you know!) use a synonym instead. In this case, tarmac would fit the bill nicely.

Now, remember I mentioned that Ed's fight with the Daedra was drawn out and slow to read? Just generally clunky? Well, this is because that fight, and the build-up for it, was so riven with what is known as purple prose, that it became hard to read. Purple prose is what happens when people with little experience in writing try to make their story more epic by using overly complicated words for pretty mundane things. Instead of writing "The demon had now walked up to Ed so that he could clearly see it" and then follow with a fairly straight-forward description of the demon's physical characteristics, we get something about "the distance being bridged" and an incredibly, and internally contradictory, physical of the demon. I dunno what causes this behaviour, but I put some blame on Eragon and a lot on Tolkien! Tolkien's language was one of the reasons I wanted to put the Lord of the Rings away and never touch it again, no matter what his fans think. You can nothing but admit that although Tolkien could write good descriptions of nature, he could not write a good battle-scene. This is not opinion. It is fact!
Edberry... suffers from the same problem. If a battle is to work in writing, the writing has to be succinct and punchy, literally! It doesn't do with half-baked descriptions of martial art grips and stuff, not when the sentences are laden with too many adjectives and are too long in the first place!

Now, the true thing in this writing that made me stop reading: the mish-mash of Japanese and English for "authenticity". Apart from the occasional word or title, this method should NEVER, EVER be used, for any language. Especially not if you're a teenage American anime-nerd. Why? It reduced the level of intelligence in your writing drastically every time you use it. It is stupid! Again using my Space Outlaws as examples, I only ever use this technique for words of affirmation (The High Armageddon Jawohl!), titles (Moskvanian naroddny kommissar) as well as those instances when alien tongues are spoken and the (main) characters listening don't understand what they are saying, as well as for some names.
In Edberry... we get a wonderful mix of Japanese and English in lines like this:

"YAMEDAE-KUDASAI, IT HURTS! LET ME GO, ONEGAI, LET ME GO, IT HURTS LET ME GO-KUDASAI, LET ME GO-KUDASAI!” Hikari cried and begged the man.

That, Ladies and Gentlemen, is a mess! That can't, with the best of will, be called English! Besides, the Japanese and English grammar doesn't translate well into each other, so the Japanese words are used pretty wrongly as far as their position in the sentence is concerned.

Also, the author mentions background music, from some band I have never heard of. This is moronic, no other way to put it. This is a short-story, even if it is fanfiction. If you don't see why this is dumb in the extreme, you are a lost case with no taste. Or an idiot. Possibly both.

Oh yeah, and to round off the language bit: the (bleeping) of the more unwholesome cuss-words. Here's a handy guide: If you are going to use the harsher words of the English languge, use them. Do not turn the fic into a David Letterman-show. This is the Internet, it is okay to curse. Either that, or chose to use only weaker ones, or none at all. Choice is simple. Either you omit them or you go the whole hog. Don't pussy-foot around! The story is rated T for Teen anyway!
I just don't get the logic behind it.

Three way cross-over is INSANE!
Phew! This was long! But I had so much bile to went after attempting to read this for uptowards an hour and getting nowhere. So we will round off.

In the mandatory introductory exposition, author-on-a-soap-box, the author asks the, obviously, rhethoric question whether he is mad to attempt a three way cross-over. I want to answer that question with a resounding YES!
Now, using the Elder Scrolls, with its rich background work, well-filled-out world and smoothly functioning "physics engine" as it is an RPG-setting, is no dumb idea. It is a spliffing idea! No problem there. As long as you don't reiterate the game plot! I can't stress this well enough. I didn't hang on to the plot long enough to see any, ANY, Elder Scrolls references at all, so I felt kinda lost, and put out.
Combining TES with the Eds? Fair enough. It works, I did something similar when I wrote the Space Outlaws (which are more of a semi-cross-over, as I practically only use the "physics engine" of WH40K). But to add a Yuri-manga to the mix? A story which starts out being about the Final Battle of the World quickly dissolves into some romance-story with girl-on-girl pairings? What the crikey?
So, mixing three ways is crazy.

Oh, and you write this without profit in mind (I certainly hope so!), you don't have to worry about the proprietors for the fandoms suing you. Why should they bother with the cross-over tripe of a second-rate writer on fanfiction.net?

Conclusion
This was, as mentioned, only a first impressions thing-a-magig rather than a full-blown review, because I couldn't get past the first chapter. It was too badly written, didn't hook me and felt just awfully generic. I don't expect every story I read to be a revolution, but it could at least try to mix things up a bit.
As it is, The Elder Scrolls: Edberry Panic!, which has a horribly misgiving name as there is precious little Elder Scrolls in it, is a mediocre story on a site full of mediocre stuff. It doesn't stand out in any manner, has serious glitches in grammar and is totally unoriginal in every sense, even in how the gender roles are portrayed (aged and boring!). The only original aspect of the story I can think of is that it tries to mix an anime, a Canadian cartoon and a Canadian video game.

I guess that is admirable. In a retarded kind of way.

In which I don't get along with spray-varnish... at all

2008-08-07T19:12:00.000+02:00

Spray-on varnish and I have this little understanding. It does what the feth it is supposed to do and I won't throw the can through the damn window for it destroying 20+ hours work of paint-job by blooming.

At least I thought we had.

Apparently, Games Workshop's Purity Seal hasn't read the contract or Terms of Service, if we can call it that.

20 hours of paintjob down the bog! My last batch of Silver Helms nearly ruined.

As luck would have it, I encountered something similar when I varnished my Sword Masters many years ago. The solution then was varnish brushed on by hand. And so it was now.

Using Vallejo Satin Varnish I managed to restore most of the colour to the minis. I say most, as the horn-blower is still almost bloomed beyond recognition.

Honestly, I know it says "don't use the spray in extreme weather" on the can, but 20°C can hardly be called extreme, can it? Ok, so there might be a high pressure rising in the air, and the air might be humid (this is after all the Swedish west coast), but what the crikey? Wasn't these varnishes originally designed for use on the British Isles? They have an even more humid climate than Sweden, as far as I know.

And it can't be that I use too much. I'm not overly liberal with varnish. I have considered that it could've been that I use too little, but I have through trial and error ruled that out too.

If anyone has any sugestion to what I might be doing wrong, please comment.

As it stands right now, I am more and more leaning towards using paint-on varnish from the start, for all my minis, and use a large brush. This is annoying, as the results aren't as clean as using a spray-on, but if the spray-on kind wishes to fuck me over, I have no other choice, do I?

Also, using paint-on varnish is more expensive in the long run... but what can be done, I ask? And I demand some sort of answer...

I'm starting to repeat myself. But I will continue to say, that Games Workshop are lying through their crooked British teeth when they claim that their spray varnishes are good. They are not. They are crap. Why? They can only be used in a dry, room-temperature environ that obviously doesn't exist in Sweden any more. At least not when I need something varnished.

I will now end this and go and turn that damned pressurised can into a mini moon-rocket. Don't try this at home, children!

--Tallyho!

In a way, you could call me a pot-head

2008-06-11T19:06:00.000+02:00

I have played Warhammer...-esque games for something uptowards ten years now and I have been painting scale miniatures (my fondest memory being getting my hands on an Airfix 1:72 scale Messerschmidt Me 262 Schwalbe at age 10) for many years more. I still have my first Spitfires and Me 109s lying around somewhere.
This means I have a very particular relationship with the paints involved in creating these little pieces of art. Strangely enough, I consider the glue more as a tool than helpful friends, as in the case with my paint pots and brushes.

So, when the Foundation Paints arrived, I was first a bit apprehensive, as I was used to my Citadel Colours, some of the pots so old I have colours that aren't around any more. Anyone else that recalls Elf Grey? Didn't think so. I am one of these hopeless people who remember the Citadel Glazes with certain fondness. I never had any, as I could barely afford getting the basic colours I needed back then, but I remember them, more than well enough.
Anyway, I got around to know the Foundation Set a little bit better, and I like them a lot. Smooth results with good coverage. Good job there, Citadel (Am I the only one to find it slightly strange that they have a name that is not only a freakishly large medieval castle, but also the name of a HUMONGOUS Wehrmacht tank operation? Apparently, yes, and I need to up my medication.)

So, as I got back into the swing of following what was going on the Games Workshop world, after a year or so dry spell, trying to get into Confrontation (it worked, but the minis take time to paint...) I was smashed over by the hype of the new Citadel Washes, that essentially would replace the old Citadel Ink series.

First, let me just say, that they live up to the hype. Ok, that out of the way, let's get down to my various reactions to this.

*"Thank goodness to that!" -This was due to my increasing exasperation at inks re-wetting themselves when in contact with, say, water and brush-on varnish? As I varnish my display pieces by hand, and not spray-can, this was most annoying, especially considering the properties of my High Elves heroes metallic shade was a Blue/Black Ink mix with water. The inks have been good, but the re-wetting ability of theirs is one that made me use very unlady-like language on more than one occasion.

*"Hang on a minute? Wasn't Citadel Washes discontinued years ago?" -A reaction that stemmed from me recognising the SMELL of the washes as I opened the pots (Oh, yes, I went there!). I remember reading somewhere (My zoology book, actually) that the memories that remain most strongly with us are those linked to sensations of smell. There is probably a perfectly plausible reason for that (shit smells bad, as does rotten food, whilst highly edible things smell good. Strange, eh?), but I wouldn't say there is for me remembering what my old pot of Flesh Wash smelled like seven years ago! Unless I had shoved my nose into that stuff already then. And I am not talking about the ink-line of Flesh Wash, I am talking about the kind that came in those high hexagonal pots with a blue pop-up lid, the one that formed a flesh coloured residue in the bottom if left to stand too long. Yeah, those pots! I told you, I am old at this...
Anyway, seems GW realised they should bring the washes back, better than ever before.

*"What is this? Three (3) different browns?" -I will avoid a Godwin's Law invoking joke on behalf of GW here, but it is true; they have techincally indcluded three different kinds of brown washes in the set of 8. They are: Devlan Mud (VERY dark brown), Ogryn Flesh (An updated Flesh Wash, with cooler name) and Gryphonne Sephia (Light, sandy brown). Now, I have mentioned this current trend in war games before and I will mention it again:
What is it with the colour palette trying to be "realistic", but only giving us a choice between gunmetal grey and dogshit brown? There is colour in the world. Amazing colour. Just look outdoors for a short moment! I am a biologist, I know the world as an explosion of colour!
True, when humans go to war, the world around tends to loose some of that wonderful colour to being covered in gun-powder residue or just plain fucking blown-up, but it isn't merit to the total lack of colour you see in many war games of today, especially the FPS genre.
All these rampant variations on BROWN gives me the feeling that I am sitting painting participants at a Nuremburg Party Rally!

No, wait... OH SHI--

School's out for summer

2008-06-04T20:39:00.000+02:00

...and the GW blokes are out of their minds.

Qoui? is probably the word flying through your head right now, if you are French/an Eddie Izzard fan.

I have read Mr. Jervis Johnson's litle preview of the 5th ed. Warhammer 40k rules.

And I have serious misgivings about it all.

Ok, Mr. Johnson has a tendency to say more than he should about things coming up, a bit like Peter Molyneux (Black and White, Fable etc.) but in this case, I felt quite a bit estranged to his enthusiasm about the new edition. Especially the new Line of Sight-rules (LoS for short).

In the past editions, LoS has been rather stylized and not very close to reality. The reason? To make for smooth game play. Now all that has been thrown out the window for ACTUAL LoS, as in determined with a laser pointer (insert joke about Lasguns here).
I am prepared to say, yes, this makes for a more immersive game. Indeed. But to sacrifice good games design just so people can "feel" closer to their minis? There is something very wrong going on here.

I think Yahtzee summed it up very well when he said (something along the lines of): "Then I realise that games designers who sacrifice good game play just to make a (emotional/satirical) point have their heads so far stuck up their arses there is a danger of them choking to death on their own heads!" I think this is what has happened at the GW development team. Sure, it might be fun during play testing to go down there, checking LoS, but imagine the discussions that will rage (or possibly not. I hope I am wrong in this you know) across tabletops during tournaments. True, with a laser pointer at stand-by it will be easy to settle those disputes, but this rules change will not take it away. Quite the contrary. Also, it IS going to slow down gaming pace considerably.

All in all, the new edition is released in 5 weeks. I'll have more info on the rules changes then and will report my thoughts on it then.

And even if I am blown away by it (fat chance! I've seen the new sprue with markers needed for WH40k all of a sudden... forget it!) I still won't continue with WH40k. I will still keep updated on the background stuff going on, for the sake of the Space Outlaws (being a WH40k spin-off essentially), but I am not going to continue gaming. I have a full time thing keeping up with Warhammer Fantasy Battles. And I have already written off Confrontation 4.

So yeah, I'll stick to what I have. Those games work and the current WHFB version is very stabile in terms of game balance. It is going to last many years, hopefully. WH40k 4th ed. did not, though I liked that version quite a bit.

I'll end this rant here. Just want to add again the school's out! XD

J-RPGs and their many short-comings...

2008-06-02T09:57:00.000+02:00

No, this is not a "reply" to Yahtzee's latest addition in Zero Punctuation.
Though, that being said, I do agree with most of his points in his review of The World Ends with You.

The reason for this post is that I did something similar to what Yahtzee did. I picked up a J-RPG a day or two ago. In my case, it was Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Demon Saga 2.

The first thing that struck me was that we're seeing a post-apocalyptic world as setting. Apparently, the first game in the series(which I haven't played, for the record) had a more generic setting, but still kinda Mad Max-y in its essence. And you know what? I like that a lot. It is also a decidedly cyber-punk setting, not fantasy or science fantasy (that is what both Star Wars and Final Fantasy is, btw), but decidedly cyber-punky. And Post-apocalyptic. Nice as nice.

Secondly, although the battles are turn based, the system is nicely free of annoying statistics. They work in the background, but don't ever bother the player. Again, very nice.

There is player-guided character development that just isn't a glossy shine with no depth. You can actually decide, as a player, what course the characters will take in their developmment as they level up! Unusual, for J-RPGs. This means that assigning every party member a clear role and devising solid tactics to win battles becomes a must. And random chance is very low in the battles themselves.
Also, this brings us to the leveling system itself:
You get two kinds of experience, essentially: karma and atma. karma is the basic experience, which levels you up. Atma can only be achieved by devouring enemies and collecting their atma. Atma is then used to master various mantras, which in turn decide what path your character will take in their development and what skills they will learn. This sounds very complicated, but is very easy to learn, as there are, as said, very little "Excel-spread-sheet syndrome" in this, very little numbers. You get metres and names to keep track of, names that have a system to them, which means it is easy street keeping track of what is a better attack-version of what and so on.

Add to this a grown-up plotline which is actually compelling and you have a bit of a gem.

All is not well in Nirvana, though, as the game has my pet peeve of healing potions and similar with fixed numbers instead of percentages of HP and MP, which means after a while, say when you hit lvl. 15, certain potions and panaceas become pretty damn useless. FinalFantasy suffers from this too. And has for a long while. Only the "tales of" games have insofar done away with this asinine way of dealing with health potions and their ilk. Sadly, their games have awfully predictable plotlines.

SMT:DDS2 also has the problem of grind, i.e that you need to reach say lvl. 10 before you can honestly do any harm to the bosses around you. Annoying as hell as its only purpose is to lengthen the game with x number of hours of "game play".

It also have random battles... I don't think I even need to say why this is annoying...

Saving points are a double edged sword. On the PS2, it feels superfluous. The machine is tough enough to be able to save anywhere, but it does add to the difficulty level of the game. God of War also has saving points, and it only felt reasonble and not at all like an annoyance, as there in general is a saving point before every major boss battle. Not so in SMT2, though.

So, summing up, I look forward to playing SMT:DDS2 during summer, as there is a lot of promise for a good storyline being played up for me, but a storyline that I can take part in and change the course of, because if I have understood the Shin Megami Tensei mission statement correctly, there are several different endings to this, which makes it a true RPG. Not just a movie in which you fiddle with the controller in the battle-scenes and watch cut-scenes.

--Tallyho!

PS The english dub of this game is not possible to turn off, BUT it is actually done pretty good! Cheers to that, Ghostlight!

A Matter of Life and Meh...

2007-11-27T19:45:00.000+01:00

So, I'm trying to get back to the habit of blogging by writing down things on little pieces of paper, when I get a blog-idea in my head, similar to the procedure of my Space Outlaw blog, which still awaits part two of the Bad Guys essay, I know!

This isn't on the list strictly, but I'll follow the list from this point on. The list mainly composes of things that irritate me beyond reason, so if I come out as a self-opinionated arrogant bitch from these writings, then so be it!

The first of these things I want to write about is Iron Maiden's latest record, A Matter of Life and Death, for no other reason that I weren't that smashed over by it. Which is odd, because I am usually tossing myself off with glee when a new Maiden record/album is announced. As you might have guessed I'm quite a Maiden fan. I have nearly all their records, and theirs are the most numerous from one single band in my collection, with only Therion and Nightwish on close second places.

I think warning bells should have sounded when I heard rumours of Maiden performing the whole of the album live and only add "oldies" as extras. When i bought the tickets for the concert, I had no idea what the final album would sound like and neither did the rest of the world, so it was too late, in my own book (cause I never refund concert tickets unless I absolutely have to) to make amends.
By October last year, I got my hands on the new record and listened it through. And listened it through again.
On about the third or fourth listen-through I was starting to catch on that there were no solid hits on this one. The only one that even comes close to the goodness and live-capacity of say Aces High is Different World, and it has about as catchy chorus line as The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. Don't get me wrong, "Rhyme..." on the Powerslave record is something of the best Harris has ever penned, but the conspicuous lack of a chorus effectively kills an opening song on an album. In that case, These Colours Don't Run and The Longest Day are far better. But they still haven't got the smash-in-your-face quality of Fear of the Dark or Holy Smoke, not to mention Aces High or Number of the Beast.

Considering The Longest Day (based on the 1962 movie with the same name), it is a song about the Normandy landings on D-Day 1944. Okay, Maiden aren't total newbs when it comes to WW2 songs (Aces High, Tailgunner and Run Silent, Run Deep), but this one fails because of the underlying flag-toting becoming too obvious in an embarrasing way. Aces High avoids this because the British were clearly victims in the Blitz, whilst at Normandy, teh Nazis were falling apart. The fact that they make the mistake and call the Nazis the euphemism evil is strange in itself. It seems almost religious. Can this be the same band that made the strangely double-entendre Tailgunner (An ode to 'Bomber' Harris. No relation to Steve Harris, I hope.)?
Secondly, the theme D-Day has been handled much better and with better drive by another band, although not nearly as big as Maiden: Sabaton and their Primo Victoria.
Now, some might say that a song about D-day should be solemn, but if I wanted solemn I'd listen to the Medal of Honour: Allied Assault OST, or the OST from Saving Private Ryan (another flag-toter, where patriotism is so thick it can be cut with a knife, only surpassing the sentimentality of it all. Americans are "rugeddly handsome" and keep on going "in the name of bloody-minded bravado" to paraphrase Yahtzee Croshaw) if I wanted solemn war-music with so much sentimentality it can be cut with a proverbial knife. The Sabaton song is very different. It is all engery and drive and "let's kick the teeth in on those Nazi bastards!". Not very much sentimentality, none actually, and practically no flag-toting. Why is that?

What more on the album? Well, the songs are long, very long. Few clock in on under 5 minutes. Most are round about seven minutes. And my favorite song, For the Greater Good of God, is nearly nine, if I recall correctly. Now, common sense amongst bands holds that unless you are extremely certain people will have LOVED a long song like this, you shouldn't under any circumstances play it live. Maiden get away with it with both aforementioned "Rhyme..." and Fear of the Dark, cause they are strong songs, that both work strangely well live. "Greater good.." does not!
Oddly enough, Sabaton's mid-tempo, eight minute Rise of Evil is fantastic live.

So, all in all, what to say about Maiden's latest record? It isn't bad, by no means. It grows more and more for each time I listen through the record. But that is the problem. By the songs being so well ironed out (pun intended), no one sticks out as particularly good. There are no bad Maiden records. But this is one of the few ones that leave me feeling strangely unfulfilled having listened to it. It isn't because Maiden seem to have gotten political in their old age; they were that on No Prayer for the Dying (Holy Smoke) and already on Killers (Women in Uniform; looking at you Margret Thatcher!). Maiden have shown they can do both political and unpolitical lyrics and music. But to make an entire record with strongly political songs? Is that such a good idea for an almost allegedly unpolitical band? True, I can understand if Tony Blair's brown-tonguing George W. Bush got them as agitated Mrs. Thatcher did in her time, but an entire smegging album? If it is because they wanted to write about all the wrongs in the world (no pun intented there!), they are waking up a bit late. A lot of other bands are already doing it and doing it better, Steve Harris's genuis notwithstanding.
So what is A Matter of Life and Death? Not whether you buy this record or not, that's for certain. Maiden have made a run-of-the-mill record; unusual, for them.

Sadly though, it might have damaged my faith in them for a good time: Dance of Death wasn't so fantastic either, when you think about it.

It's all Splinter's fault...

2007-06-16T19:59:00.000+02:00

Hrm, two blogs in about as many days. Weird...

Anyway, I'm writing this because my befuddled mind has clamped its clammy tentacles around a new "faiblesse": Skaven in Warhammer Fantasy Battles. Yup, the rat men.

I have diligently played the poncy pointy-eared pussies (High Elves) for nearly ten years now. The High Elves are arrogant, but they are also reliable, sensible, dependable and a lot of other words that end in -ible. Why on Earth would I suddenly have a change of heart and warm to the scruffy, egocentric, undiscipled and down-right EVIL rat-men of the Old World?

It could be in part that their saney steampunk inventions appeal to some part of me or maybe I'm just tired of playing an army that runs like clock-work if you know how to use it, but if you don't you get a pounding? Honestly, the Skaven probably work in the same way, but at least I can have a laugh whilst I lose the battle. Read the Warp-lightning Cannon's Misfire table if you don't believe me.
Or maybe it is all Splinter's fault. Splinter in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That or the fact that the Skaven's hell-bent will for world domination, constantly foiled by either egoism, cowardice or failing warpstone-gizmos (most likely a combo of all three) reminds me in some parodic, roundabout zaney way of the Nazis. Don't ask me why. They just do.

And it is about time I played the bad guys.
Also, I'm sick of elitist armies. That's why I won't do a Chaos Khorne army. An army even more compact than the High Elves? With NO magic? Thanks but no thanks, despite being dead-hard in close combat. Add to the fact that Chaos has sod-all on the missile front. Gah! I'm also heartedly sick of cavalry!

So it is the Skaven then, for me. The utter opposite of High Elves. Oh, and their easier to paint! I just need a drybrush or two to be able to paint vast amount of Skaven. Even dipping will be seen as slow!

Crazy as I am (I lost my common sense many years ago. I think it is the plastic glue that caused it.) I don't want to do a Warlord's Clan army. 2000 pts of Skaven is a freakish lot of rats! Unless you do a... erm... elitist Greater Clan army.

There are four Greater Clans: Pestilens, Skryre, Eshin and Moulder.
- I've never liked Pestilens. Can have something to do with the intimate connection they after all have with Nurgle. I've never liked Nurgle (apart from the new Forge World Great Unclean One, which rocks!). Maybe it's me elven heritage shining through.
- Moulder is also kinda cool. But the Rat Ogres... mmm, I dunno. I don't want an army made up of mostly dumb animals. I want Rats with humanlike intelligence. If I wanted an army of dumb animals I'd go for Orcs and Goblins.
- Skryre, then? Now we're talking! The Masters behind the zaney warpstone-gizmos. Gotta love them! Jezzails, Warpfire throwers and the Warp-lightning cannon! And Warlock Engineers! Hrm...
- Eshin, with their assassins. Tunneling rats. Oh, they have a real army list in Storm of Chaos! Nice as nice, is-is! Master Assasins? I'm listening! And you still can field vast amount of cheap Skaven Slaves? Mmmmm... throwing stars...

No contest: Eshin it is! If nothing else because Ninja Rats rock! And with their dark colour scheme, they're even easier to paint! Onwards, my chittering horde. Time to conquer Man-world, yes-yes!

--Tallyho!

Inside the Third Reich

2007-04-19T12:00:00.000+02:00

I'm currently putting the final touches to my Speerography and I've moved into what I prefer to call a virtual minefield of emotions, as the discussion over Speer's guilt can be continued into oblivion and beyond.
But that is a discussion that I in this "little essay" will have with myself more or less. I'll twist and turn the Speerian problem until I'm satisfied, but within a reasonable time limit, of course.

No the reason of this little rant, although Speer-related, is different.
It concerns his autobiography, Erinnerungen (Inside the Third Reich) and its Swedish translation.

The first book about Speer, was his own Secret Diaries of Spandau. I read it in Swedish and liked it very much. It was an epiphany to me, as an allegied anti-Nzi, to come across a man who had been very close to Hitler, but was so clearly intelligent and owned a great deal of talent as an author as well. So I was certain I wouldn't be disappointed when I picked up his autobiography, in Swedish.
Guess what? The translator had decided to abridge the version I got my hands on. It irked me some as I read the translator's foreword, but I decided I should give it a go. The translator's reasons for cutting in the text had been that he'd just cut out bits considering things in Speer's life that he deemed to be of lesser interest to Swedish readers.
I can safely say I didn't like this book nearly as much as I'd liked the unabriged "Secret...". I knew it wasn't because of the author himself; the text flow had been good enough. But the content of it had seemed very patchy at intervals and made little sense. I decided to put this down on the translator.
I recently bought an American version of Inside the Third Reich, making sure it wasn't abridged and guess what? What I've read so far makes a lot more sense and there is much more flow to the text than before, despite it being translated to English, a language that is more different from German than Swedish is.

Personally, I hate when books are released as abridged versions. What is the prupose of them? I mean, people don't go cutting out entire acts out of a Wagner opera or a Shakespeare play, do they? What would Hamlet be without its famous soliloquy? Or Das Ring der Niebelungen without the first part: Das Rheingold? Nothing, that what.
So, when I pick up a book, I expect to get the whole thing. I don't want some translator to decide what I should or should not be able to read. Let me decide that for myself, thank you very much. I mean, I decided to read the memoirs of one of the 20th century's most controversial men. I am prepared for controversy in the book, damn it! I don't want to open it and read and discover that some git translator has been fiddling wih it! It all gets a feeling of those stickers you see on CDs about Explicit Content. Well, what else is to be expected from a band named Cannibal Corpse or Slayer? So stop defacing perfectly good album covers with those eechy stickers.

In the end, one only has to wonder who's the bigger Nazi; Albert Speer who wrote his memoirs or the translator who decides what parts of it I get to read?

Till next time!

--Tallyho!

PS I think this can be classed as another one of those Industrial World problems... My mother had no understanding of my criticism when I told her about this. Though I can understand if she's getting tired of hearing about Speer. I haven't talked about much else these last 1.5 years.

Qoute of the day.

2007-01-04T13:45:00.000+01:00

"That's what it's all about, sis. Luck. You gotta have so much luck that four-leaf clovers comes out of your ass!"

--My brother Martin (D34D_L33T)