Thursday 26 May 2016

Oh Games-Workshop, you jokers you..

So yeah, the Games-Workshop's homepage has a banner promoting Total War: Warhammer with the following slogan: Play the game, Collect the miniatures. That would be great, given that Dawn of War was a big pusher into getting people into 40K. Just one problem with that....

Warhammer: Fantasy Battles doesn't exist anymore. Bit difficult to promote people into buying a miniatures line that doesn't exist.

Alright, I admit that they still have a bunch of these miniatures still in stock and they aren't going to remove them just yet while they can gain cash from this promotion, but prior to this game's release, most of that stock had disappeared from the site. My guess is this new management has seen an opportunity and is jumping on it with what they have left. Don't get me wrong, this is great. Now you too can grab what you need for the fan rules 9th Edition game so you too can enjoy Warhammer much in the same way as Total War style play.

I'd probably jump on this myself, but I'd rather buy the game then pay the same amount of cash on a box of troops. I got enough of them to paint as it is and given my brother hates what's happen to his Elves since End Times, a game of Age of Sigmar is probably out of the question. A game of Total War: Warhammer on the other hand is something he's more keen on. Now if only the had Skaven....

Colette Crew: First Dove

So using what I had left to make the bases, I made bases.....

...er, anyway. I did finish the painting and as I feared they did not look exactly like my large base, but some of them were close. The worst one happened to be a 30mm base, perfect for placing one of the three Mechanical Doves from the base on.


The photo was rushed, but it's roughly what you'd expect. The problem arouse when the lines that had been carved in didn't show up and trying to repair them with paint and wash screwed the colours up. I glued the flying stand on the worst spot to cover that part up with the rest still being somewhat exposed, but not as bad. While disappointing, I'm not too put off as the Doves are totems that come and go in the crew and are not as important as the main stars, so here's hoping I don't screw that up.

Tuesday 24 May 2016

Australian History Is Interesting

You'd be surprised by what they don't teach you in schools. This well acted documentary is just one of them.

I mean, I hadn't even heard about most of it and it was during this doco and through conversation with my mother that at one point schools did in fact teach such history. So why don't they do it now? I mean, history is vital to learn as it helps shape the future. Learn from past mistakes to become better, those who fail to learn from past mistakes are doomed to repeat them, that sort of thing. Hell, we still haven't added the Aboriginal people to the constitution yet and the more important question to that is, why hasn't it been done?

Needless to say, this was a very interesting documentary and we need more of these in the future.

Starcraft 2 Co-op

So from me having it out with Blizzard to actually giving them some praise. Over the last week me and my brother have been playing Starcraft 2 co-op and I kind of enjoy it. I am limited since I don't own Legacy of the Void (EB Games screwed up my pre-order and nothing has happened since, though I did play single-player on my brothers account just to see how it ended) and as such I was limited to the Raynor, Kerrigan and Artanis, but I did get Abathur since he is my favourite Starcraft character (I love playing him in Heroes of the Storm).

So apart from Kerrigan who is an actual character in the game, each Hero is more for voices and no actual interaction. However, each Hero has a number of units and buildings that they have access to and gain a bonus as that Hero levels up, unlocking one per level up to level 15. Past that the Hero gains a mastery point that can be used to give a very tiny (but no less useful) bonus to their force.

You and your co-op partner pick a Hero and then enter a mission. These missions are usually based on an event from the single-player campaign and you get just enough time to start up, but when it starts you need to react fast enough. There are four difficulties and the higher the difficulty the more XP you earn and after a mission is when that XP goes towards leveling up. But it doesn't end there. See, they have a weekly mission called Mutations and it is a harder version of a mission. You also need a Hero of level 5 or more in order to play it. Each week a mission is taken and then is tweaked to be harder by adding in extra problems.

So for example, we take this weeks one which was stop the trains from the Wings of Liberty campaign. What made this one different was that the sight range was limited and that Infested Terran were everywhere, more so as killing any unit would spawn them and the higher the health the more that spawned (and those trains have a lot of health). I really enjoyed this and it proved to be more interesting with the added objectives that normally come on higher difficulties.

My only complaint is that it needs more missions. I would defiantly would like more Hold Out missions as apart from one, the rest are Assault missions. That and I would like more Assault missions that were larger, but with a larger time limit too. Beyond that I feel that this mode is great and I look forward to playing more games of it.

My Problem With Overwatch

Why add such a deep story if it plays no part in the game? Seriously, I go so interested in the story that when I finally got into the Beta I was so disappointed with what I was playing. Why have two sides if you aren't going to have two sides? They are at war with each other, yet they are helping each other fight their own allies? Why?

At least with League of Legends when it started did have some explanation of why they were fighting, but this game makes little sense. I mean, if it was a tacked on version of multiplayer to a single player campaign (something like Halo or CoD), then it would be just fine. However, this is multiplayer only and with no real explanation to why this is like this after bringing out amazing cinematics to explain the story, it just makes it confusing. If your not going to add a single-player storyline, place heroes on one team and villains on the other or even give an explanation of why the heroes and villains are allied in a match.

I know I'm thinking way too much into this, but why bother giving an in-depth universe if the game itself is just a any hero pick multiplayer game with standard objectives? It seems like a complete waste of a franchise to put this much effort into creating this deep story with characters and events when or your doing is creating a multiplayer only game with no story progression. It just infuriates me at the waste of such a potentially great story driven campaign and yes, you can still have one as a multiplayer only game.

And to think that this has gotten me more worked up then the fact there are cosmetic micro-transactions is a paid multiplayer game,it's not even a free-to-play model (and yes, they are loot crates and not skins, but they unlock cosmetics so I'm still counting them as the same thing).

AVGN & Ghostbusters - Did Anyone Actually Pay Attention?

This has bugged me for the last few days and now finally I can't take it anymore, when was James ever sexist in that video? This may surprise many of you (well, any who didn't read the Bio), but I am a Feminist. What is a Feminist? It's someone who believes in equality amongst genders, as in things like equal pay, equal rights, equal respect etc. The problem occurs when our voices are drowned out by extremists (commonly known on the Internet as a Feminazi). The real problem occurs when the extreme views of a Femionazi is mistaken as the views of a Feminist.

What has this to do with the Angry Video Game Nerd? Well the person who plays him, James Rolfe, did a video about why he wasn't going to see the new Ghostbusters movie and review it. Apparently from this video he was accused as being a sexist misogynist.....

.....except that he wasn't.

Anyone who was actually paying attention to what he had said would have know that the only time he bough up the fact that the new Ghostbusters were female was when he had said that people were referring to this movie as the female Ghostbusters movie and his response was that calling it that was stupid cause it's like calling the original on the male Ghostbusters movie. This was simply in regards to the fact the movie is simply called Ghostbusters and that it should have had something added to it to distinguish it from the original. Nowhere in that entire video was any sexist comment made, no "I'm not watching it cause the cast are women" speech. As such, I have no idea which moronic idiot came up with that conclusion nor who was stupid enough to back them up without watching it themselves. It's these people which hinder our progress in equality when they make controversy where there is none and cause the hate to flow our way instead or theirs. If some were actual feminists, then shame on you for making a mountain out of a non-existing mole hill. Yes, there will always be misogynists causing trouble, but we need intelligent discussions, not flat out insults. When we start doing that, we drop ourselves to a lower level and all meaning is lost.

As for my view on the movie. It doesn't look good and many of his points I agree with. Why didn't they add a second title to the Ghostbusters name (you know, like theGhostbusters Re-energized option James gave) as it does make it slightly confusing as to where it stands. Though to be fair, most remakes/re-imaginings that use the same title as the original rarely turn out good. I found most of the jokes in the trailers to be cringe worthy (though I did chuckle at the selfie scene in the second trailer), the ghosts look meh and the script seems terrible. The job of a trailer is to get you pumped to see a movie, but this has failed badly. The only positive thing is the actresses, who do appear to be giving great performances in it. Personally, I really want to see Kate McKinnon play her role out as it seems most of the trailers revolve more around Melissa McCarthy and Leslie Jones characters and she never really got much time in them. I recon she will be my favorite Ghostbuster in this film.

I had a discussion about this with my brother and we agreed that a bad trailer doesn't mean a movie will be bad. Though given how badly most movie franchise remakes/reboots have been, it has an uphill climb and as pointed out that the history of bad trailers leading to bad movies doesn't help. As a great critic once pointed out that you could have the best actors put on their greatest performances, but if the script is terrible then it wont be enough to save the movie.

I can only hope that these trailers were just bad editing and that the actual movie will be great.

Saturday 21 May 2016

May Update

So here we are, back to making excuses for the lack of updates. Not going to bother explaining as it's very much the same as before. So instead, I'm just going to throw in what is happening.

First up, Photography is a little slow, though this is more based on the fact I really haven't gone anywhere to do photography, so not much there. Will eventually go back to doing some more, but not just yet.

Miniatures are next and again, not much has happened. I kind of feel that the bases are the problem here, if I don't have bases ready then it puts me off painting the miniatures. I'm nearly finished the first few bases for the Colette crew to start off, though I still need more Styrofoam strips to continue more of them and making those bases are a major pain. Once I finish the first few then I'll start painting the miniatures for them.

My Gremlins have had a few coats of paint and apart from a few touch ups and fine details, they are mostly done and will get a few shots uploaded soon. I'm not overly happy with the outcome, but that's my self-critic. I admit I'm not good a blending or fine details and I guess that's what I don't like about them, but they still look good. I plan on added more Gremlins soon. Indeed, Wyrd's Through the Breach role-playing game is planning to release a Gremlin expansion and I'm looking forward to it as it not only will give me some great Gremlin lore, but I love the idea of playing a banjo playing Gremlin who tells tall tales and has strange adventures. Now if I only had a group to play with.

I have some other plans that are still in the design stages, but I hope to get some more info on that soon, hopefully within the next month or two.