For starters, I find the Weird West setting one of the more interesting settings I have come across in current roleplaying games.  It mixes fantasy with some anachronism and references to real historical figures, and this adds up to me always wanting to read more of the mythology.  It seems that in the old edition of Deadlands (which I played only briefly in college) there were several expansion books that gave the system a very rich history that evolved over time, and my hope is that they continue to do this with the new edition.

Curiosity got the best of me in this case, and I have to say I was excited (and terrified) to find that the Prairie Tick is included in the Marshal’s Handbook.  These critters provided one of the most insane total party kills that I have ever been witness to… a small group of ticks ambushed my college adventuring party and killed EVERYONE in fairly short order.  Reading through their description, not much has changed with the new edition… unfortunately it would be metagaming like mad if my current character just toted around a quart of castor oil!

This likely won’t be the last time I write about this book or our Deadlands campaign.  So far getting into Savage Worlds has been interesting, with any luck my skills at D&D Dungeon Mastering will translate well to this new setting and system.

They’re calling the setting “dark fantasy”, which is mostly like regular fantasy, except people are complete and utter assholes to each other just like they can be in real life. Expect to have to deal with situations involving one or more of the following: slavery, racism, rape, social castes, homosexuality, cooking, prostitution, pet care, death, and poor personal hygiene. Demons and darkspawn ain’t got nothing on the horrors that all the humans, dwarves, and elves seem to enjoy perennially inflicting on each other. (In fact, all the demon archetypes are based on sins, which probably makes it our fault for them, too.) As a result of this new, darker, tone, choices in this game tend to be a bit murkier than in past games. Before, you’d pick the “good guy” choice or the “bad guy” choice. A lot of times now there is no choice that makes everybody happy except Team Evil, and you have to steal from Peter to pay Paul. Somebody gets the shaft, to one degree or another, even if you’re playing a good guy. So, while you will almost certainly love this game dearly, be advised you may want to save up money for a few sessions with a good therapist when it’s all over.

Well, presumably. I have not yet completed the game yet, though I am 40 hours into it already and I never want it to end. Ever. But of the parts I have played, please allow me to list a few of the things I liked (and *gasp* disliked).

Let’s start with the tips o’ the hat.

• TACTICS
  The new Tactics system for your computer-controlled allies is a step up from before, when they would mostly just act stupid and you did all the work. However, it does mean you will probably die if you don’t do this right. You need a good healer in this game, and you need a big brawny warrior-type to keep all the nasty ogres and darkspawn from squishing the mages between their toes. Finding good combinations of tactics is an integral part of this game, so if you’re dying repeatedly, look here first.
• WRITING
  Though you may find some scenarios familiar, the writing in this game has a way of making you look just a little differently at common fantasy stuff. The Elves are either second-class citizens or they’re like you’re used to except they’re always on the run because they’re persecuted like second-class citizens. Dwarves dress like you’re used to, but they’ve clearly been reading way too much Machiavelli and you could try to cut the politics with a knife (but someone would discredit the knife in the eyes of the people first, so nobody would ever pick it up in the first place). And let’s not forget the casteless dwarves, who it’s legal to murder and rape because they’re not real people because they’re not noble. Never thought that kind of stuff about dwarves before. (Not sure I wanted to!)  But it sure as hell breaks the jolly, ale-suckin’ Gimli clones we’ve all become used to over the years. Even so, it’s never stale, and it never seems just like they just changed things to get your attention like “HEY KIDS if you liked elves then you’re gonna love ELVES XTREME: SYLVAN BRONTOSAUROIDS!!!!!!“ This stuff is really well done. And with the absolutely mind-crushingly huge amount of stuff to read in the Codex as you gather information in the game, you’ll be glad they used a large font size because you won’t want to stop anytime soon.

There are a few things about Dragon Age: Origins I’m *gasp* not crazy about too.

• VISIBLE SPELL EFFECTS DURING CONVERSATION
  Is it really necessary to keep glowy spell effects going during conversations? I play a mage, which means I basically light people on fire all day long, which usually includes my party members since I’m playing normal mode where they don’t die when I do that.  The end result of this is that I frequently having myself in pleasant  conversation with all my immolated friends. And if the gatling gun of moral quandaries wasn’t going to put me in therapy, this will.
• WTF DRY HUMPING
  It’s no secret that there’s sex scenes. But when they’re doing it, they strip down only to their underwear. I can understand why this might be done in our weird puritanical society that doesn’t mind a firehose of blood spraying out of a nun’s decapitated corpse but freaks out over seeing a pixellated nipple. What I cannot understand is why said underwear consists of large strips of what appears to be burlap. It is approximately as sexy as a Golden Girls marathon. What’s worse, is that the regular everyday outfits worn by some characters show more and look less like some sort of abstinence-cultist diaper. I guess the good news is there won’t be any storylines about accidentally knocking Leliana up. But I guess my point is that Mass Effect’s nude scenes showed us that this whole business can be done tastefully, without getting too graphic, and with the basic premise intact that your characters are not dry humping. The game is not called Amish Age: Bundlings.

Okay, that’s all the bad stuff I can think of, except for maybe that I don’t like how forehead crinkling facial expressions look on Leliana’s face. In short: run – do not walk - and get yourself a copy of this game. But be ready not to sleep. There’s no time for that! There’s darkspawn to kill, stories to discover, and burlap-clad nubiles to seduce.

Ligretto

I love Ligretto.  It’s fast-paced and a lot of fun.  One box with allow 4 players to play the game; you can add expansions to add more players.  Each player gets a stack of cards that are numbered 1 to 10 on different colors: green, red, yellow & blue.  You deal yourself a “Ligretto” deck of 10 cards, then lay out three face-up, playable cards.  The rest you hold in your hand and flip through, three at a time.  Anytime you come across a 1 in your three face-up cards or in your hand, you move it to start a pile in the middle of the play space.  Then, anyone can add to that pile, sequentially matching the color.  So I play a Green 1, Dante or anyone else at the table could play the Green 2 on that pile.  If you play one of your three face-up cards, you replace it from the “Ligretto” deck.  The first person to run out their “Ligretto” deck wins the round.  Then, everyone counts the cards they have in their hand, multiplies them by two and subtracts that total from the number of cards they played on the piles.  The first person to 99 points wins.

The trick to Ligretto is being able to keep track of all the piles in play.  With four players, we easily had 7-10 piles on which to play, and trying to keep track of all of them is the key to winning.  So this game is great for those of us who can multitask and keep track of so many game elements all at once.  If you’re the kind of person who is most comfortable focusing only on one element at a time, this could be a frustrating game.

On the Double

On the Double is still a fast-paced card game, but it differs from Ligretto in one key element.  On the Double plays on a single discard pile, so there are few game elements to track.  The game begins by dealing the entire deck among all players.  Then, the youngest person plays their top card to create the discard pile.  Each card has a split personality: each side of the card has a color & shape combination.  So you have two different shapes and two different colors on each card.  You can play a card if you can match either the shape or color on each half of the card to the card on the top of the discard pile.  If the top card is a yellow-cross/red-diamond, you need to find a card from your hand that is: yellow and red, or cross and diamond, or yellow-square and blue-diamond, or blue-cross and red-star or anything that would allow you to match one element on each half of the card.  You still have to be quick to play your cards, otherwise, someone will play their card first.

Game Experience

Ligretto was my prefered game; I had a fun time keeping track of all the various game elements, and I won two of the three hands we played.  Dante preferred On the Double, as he could focus better on the one discard pile.  They were both very fun games, and we had a great time playing them.  Thanks to Frank who ran the demos for us.

I recommend both games, but I encourage you to consider your game-play preference and pick the one that’s best for you.  In the end, we brought home our own On the Double set, and we are looking forward to crazy amounts of fun as we introduce our friends to the game.

Blue Dragon Plus is the direct sequel to Blue Dragon, a game that came out here in the States in late 2007 on the Xbox 360. Unfortunately, I’d never played Blue Dragon before, and it would have been a big help. Blue Dragon Plus plops you down right in the middle of things from the very start. You get a vague paragraph as each character appears about what they did in the previous game, but it’s all to the effect of “helped out to defeat Nene”. I felt like I was supposed to know more than I did to get what was happening, and that if I had played the original I would be perfectly comfortable.

The game’s visuals didn’t appeal to me much at first. Not that they looked terrible, far from it. The style in which the characters were drawn seemed somewhat kiddy, which put me off at first. (Which is weird for me, considering how many cartoons I watch.) I got the same impression at first from some of the characters, most notably Marumaro. I think maybe I was expecting something else.

The screenshots I’d seen made this look like a turn-based strategy game like Final Fantasy Tactics. It was a bit jarring at first when I discovered everything worked like that, but in realtime. I was having a lot of trouble figuring out how to keep track of my characters and make them move sensibly.

Admittedly, it took some willpower to get me through those first few minutes. And here’s my advice about Blue Dragon Plus: don’t give up on it too easily!

A few battles later, I’d discovered the buttons that select all your characters and figured out how to work the camera. There’s also a very helpful map on your top screen if you can’t find one of your guys. The game isn’t so much big on overt tutorials (the ones it does give are a little confusing), but what it is good at is putting you in situations where you learn the skills you need as you go. For instance, I got tossed into a really fun battle where four robots with different strengths and weaknesses attack all at once, and that helped me learn the individual capabilities of my party members.

I was very pleased to see that there are things to do on the battlefield besides beat people up. There are things on the battlefield to interact with that get used either in combat or as puzzles. For instance, I had to move one of my characters to a lever that controlled the flow of steam from a pipe, and then use my other characters to goad a bad guy into the steam to disable him. I really enjoyed that, it sets this game apart in my mind from your standard FIGHT MAGIC HEAL dynamic used in so many RPGs over the years.

The story also started getting better as I got through the game a little. I personally have trouble giving a crap about a story unless I get invested in the characters. Let’s just say until my robot friend is turned back from the dark side and we’re playing awesome robo-baseball back at the castle, I won’t be putting this game down anytime soon.

VISUALS: 7/10
As I said before, the characters seem a little kiddy at first but you get used to them fast. Most everything is 2d sprites on top of 3d backgrounds, which works really well on the DS. I’ve hated this before on larger screens because it looks weird, but smaller it seems to blend well. Nothing blew my socks off but it’s a good looking game. (And if you’re into cutscenes, this game will NOT disappoint you.)

MUSIC: 8/10
It’s Nobuo Uematsu. Of course the music is good. Prepare for it to be stuck firmly in your head.

GAMEPLAY: 8/10
High learning curve at first, almost frustrating enough to make me quit. Glad I didn’t! Non-combat objectives make me very happy.

STORY: 7/10
Admittedly, I’m not all the way through the game yet. But it’s keeping my interest, and the aforementioned non-combat objectives during battle help drive the story home for me.

OVERALL: 7/10
Yeah, I know the scores don’t average. It’s my review, I can do it however I want!
Basically what we have here is a good RPG that I’m a bit worried people are going to overlook. I wouldn’t wait in line out in front of Gamestop all night to pick this one up, but would I like to have this with me at the airport for 2d4 hours in between crappy airline snacks and flight delays? You bet.

Here’s a little widget with some Blue Dragon Plus stuff on it if you’d like to learn more about the game. Of special interest is the “Characters” button, which would have saved me from all sorts of confusion at the beginning.