Party Time

This weekend past, I went to a LAN party. We barbequed, sipped drinks, laughed ourselves silly and most prominently, played games. After all, that's' what a LAN party is for. A great weekend all in all.

Naturally the best laid plans never work out as intended, and although we had a list of games to play, we spent way too much time trying to figure out exactly what to play.

The standout game for me has to be The Ship. Imagine a luxury cruise set in the 1920's, just like on Poirot. Now imagine everyone is trying to kill someone else. This is The Ship.

The tension comes from trying to find your target in an unobserved area, and then brutally exterminating them with a plethora of weapons from candlesticks to Tommy-guns.

Since everyone is hunting someone, it means you are also being hunted, and on several occasions, I was just about to murder my victim when I was viciously massacred from behind. Very tense and absolutely hilarious. Although if you are super competitive, I think you might find The Ship more frustrating than fun. I absolutely loved it.

I also tried Project Reality, a modern military shooter. Now, I'm not partial to this genre, but PR is free so I thought I'd try it anyway. I'm still not partial to the genre, but I get what this game is for. It's not a twitch reflex FPS, it's a slower paced tactical shooter, but even so, it's not for me. The learning curve on PR is very steep, and I lack the passion needed to mount the curve and get good at this game. For me it's running around for five minutes and then getting killed by an enemy I didn't even see. But if the modern military shooters are your cup of tea, go check it out.

Having stayed up way too late the entire weekend, I'm naturally pretty damn tired, so I'm cutting it short today.

Until next time, have a fantastic week!

I am not a crook...

OK, I bet you're wondering why I'm blogging on a Saturday, right?

Well the truth is, I'm going out of town for a couple of days, and I simply don't trust Blogger to publish my post if I put it on a timer. So, you're getting your weekly dose of Eccentricity and Spheres today.

I read yesterday that apparently all the official papers on the JFK assassination will be released in 2017. Of course, as one eloquent redditor put it, “I bet redacted did it”. Wouldn't surprise me...

But it got me thinking, and I remembered a great documentary series on Youtube concerning another fascinating event in American politics, the Watergate Scandal.

Since I'm pretty busy today (and my brain won't accept blogging on Saturdays) I thought you all might like to see it.

The really interesting aspect of this multi-part series are all the interviews with the actual people involved. This is not people talking about what other people did. Oh no, it's frank interviews with Nixon, Liddy, Halderman, Hunt etc...

So if that's your cup of tea, get ready for some amazing stuff.

I'm not embedding the videos here, just follow the links instead.

Until next Monday have a great week!

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmxyM7ptKq4

Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIXFJVmdgEg

Part 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9R--FUOeM8

Part 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SWPNked0dQ

Part 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_RYJJWZOXE

Dead of Winter

Last Saturday I finally got to play a cool board game called Dead of Winter.

These days you can't take three steps without tripping over something with zombies in it, but DoW is slightly different.

Yes, there are zombies and they can be lethal, but the real challenge is managing resources and dealing with other survivors.

At the start of the game, every player draws a secret objective card, and amongst those is a traitor card. But there are enough regular secrets that you don't know if there even is a traitor in any given game. It's just that there might be a traitor that adds tension.

In order to win, the main objective of the scenario has to be fulfilled as well as your own secret objective, and this can be very hard as the other players won't necessarily cooperate with you.

There are lots of other difficulties as well. Random events can appear and derail everything badly, and the crisis deck that adds pressure every turn can change a fairly placid scenario into a panicked frenzy.

Since I've only played two games, I'm not qualified to actually review Dead of Winter properly, but from what I can tell, it's a great game that could benefit from a little more love.

Take the crisis deck as an example. From what I've seen, every crisis is collect as many of a particular resource as there are players or bad stuff happens. There doesn't seem to be any variation on that which is a shame.

But over all, I'm impressed. The artwork is sharp and detailed, the flavor texts are really good. And the mechanics that govern the game as a whole are very sharp.

So if you're looking to fortify a base and explore a small town in the middle of a harsh winter, with one of your fiends a potential traitor, get Dead of Winter.

Until next time, have a great week!

GTA Online

I talked earlier about Grand Theft Auto V and how good of a game it is.

It still is, but I've been playing it's online mode almost exclusively lately. Going on heists with your friends or just taking care of smaller jobs amongst other things is a lot of fun.

But this weekend I've been racing. Soooo much racing. You see, I discovered that you can run solo races. This is both good and a bit bad.

The good sides are myriad. You get better at driving. You get to know the tracks, although at more than 80 tracks for cars alone, not to mention motorbikes, helicopters, jets and bicycles, it's hard to remember which race is which. And finally you get to play around with all the different vehicles in the game.

This last point is really cool, since you have to buy all the cool cars in Online mode. In the single player game, you can steal any car and just keep it, but in Online there is an invisible line and any car above that line is too hot to steal, so you have to pay for it if you want it. And some of those cars are ridiculously expensive.

But if you set up a single person race, you can choose which car to drive, and you can eventually test them all. This has been so much fun. Not to mention that all races this weekend has been giving double experience, but more on that later.

So what's bad? Well, there are lots of different ways you can modify your cars in GTA Online. But most of these mods require that you win a certain amounts of races. And that is hard. Naturally you can't loose a single player race, so they do not count against the unlock requirements. I really wish that you could race against AI drivers and that this would count against the unlocks. But no, you have to race human drivers, and I've done that too. I've even won some, but of you want to win in order to unlock things, it's pretty silly to compete in open races, since the odds of winning against eight other players becomes slim indeed. It is very exciting though. Very adrenaline pumping.

Finally the amount of RP (xp in other games) is surprisingly good, particularly when you get double

the amount. I made a new character on Thursday evening because I wanted a female character as well as my regular gangster, Vinnie. As of this morning, my girl Fan Mei, is almost 39. Vinnie is 54 and only the last four levels have been from racing this past weekend. So the rate at which you can level up your characters through solo racing is amazing. And you can make some serious money as well. I have pulled in over 300K doing this.

Free money and experience. What's not to like.

That is it for today, until I see you again, have an exciting week!