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[Opinion] Why Dreadfleet Matters

Posted on October 13, 2011 by The Irishman

There’s been a lot said about Games Workshop’s most recent limited release, Dreadfleet, of both the good and bad variety. Internet forums have been raging about a few major points, most notably whether or not the production of Dreadfleet took valuable time away from other development, whether or not Dreadfleet is simply a half-assed attempt at a money grab, or whether or not Dreadfleet is too expensive for what the boxed set includes. I don’t think any of these are the most important matter to discuss; rather, I think it’s more prudent to explore why the release of Dreadfleet is important.

Phil Kelly really likes pet projects

While it’s obvious Dreadfleet can claim it’s origins with GWs defunct Specialist Game Man-O-War, it is unique in enough ways to be divorced from that product. Sure, they’re both naval combat games set in the Warhammer universe, but that’s about it. Where Man-O-War was about fleets of ships, Dreadfleet is implicitly about unique ‘character’ ships with very distinct captains. They’re different beasts, to be sure. Why is that important? Why does it matter? It shows us that Games Workshop isn’t simply relying on past Specialist Games and rehashing them (as was one of the ‘complaints’ in regards to Space Hulk); rather, they’re allowing folks like Phil Kelly an avenue to explore new designs outside of their core product line. Fostering the creativity of their development teams with pet projects like this was previously relegated to Forge World. The sheer existence of Dreadfleet shows us that GW is now encouraging this within their main hobby development departments. This is a big deal. Why? By fostering these pet projects, it is more likely that GW is going to be able to retain their quality developers like Phil Kelly for the future. Creativity is a the crux of what makes this hobby flourish, and this new-found leeway by GW Corporate can only help to grow that internal creativity.

Tons of Sprues. Tons of Detail

Dreadfleet also shows us that Games Workshop continues to push the envelope when it comes to injection molded plastic models. Anyone that has put hands on the Dreadfleet spures can attest to the obscene amount of detail on each ship. Even more impressive is the fact that the ships can feasibly stay together without glue. And this isn’t the stiff, denser plastic that was used to achieve the detail in the Space Hulk set. It’s standard, grey, run-of-the-mill GW plastic. Are the Dreadfleet ships more detailed than those released by Spartan Games in their Dystopian Wars line? They might be. Why is that matter? The Dystopian Wars minis are in metal and resin, materials that allow for deeper undercuts and traditionally greater detailed miniatures. The fact that GW has been able to achieve a similar level of detail in injected molded plastic shows us that GW is pushing those boundaries as far as they can.

Want this? Supporting Dreadfleet can only help

With both of the aforementioned points comes the biggest benefit for many: the proof that Games Workshop is dedicated to producing these one-off boxed games. I read so often from longbeards online that they miss the days when GW released boxed games and that they miss their Specialist Games like Warhammer Quest. The release and subsequent success of Dreadfleet will only encourage GW to revisit some of these older Specialist Games. With the 25^th Anniversary of Blood Bowl looming next year, this can only be a good thing. I expect we’ll see some sort of Blood Bowl anniversary box next year, stuffed with plastic sprues overflowing with miniatures that are chock full of detail.

Despite whether or not you consider the “limited” nature of the product a “money grab” or not is irrelevant. You can think Dreadfleet is too expensive, or that it simply isn’t your thing. That’s fine. But seeing new products from GW that deviate from their core three product lines should be the focus, and THAT should garner your support. We clamour for more creativity from GW. We beg them for releases that don’t involved Space Marines. The release of Dreadfleet has shown us that they’re willing to try these new products out. For our hobby, that’s a good thing.

This entry was posted in Opinion and tagged Dreadfleet, Games Workshop, Specialist Games, Warhammer, Warhammer Fantsy. Bookmark the permalink.
So Long To My 3ed. Necrons…

Posted on August 19, 2011 by Johnny Pong
Sniff.. You'll be Missed, Deceiver

I know it may be a bit premature, but with rumors flying and better detail coming out almost weekly on the 5ed (6ed?) Necrons I think it is time to pour a little liquour on the ground for my Chrome Homies.

Now, a lot of players really won’t miss the current Necron Codex.   It certainly had run its course and in the face of newer codexes, really falls flat from in the ability to customize certain builds and stay competitive.    However, I’m here to tell you that the codex was wonderful in its simplicity, and starting out in 5ed it helped guide a Cincinnati Warhammer 40K NOOB

METALLIC GREATNESS.

1) Lack of Troop Options.

For a Noob this really an awesome thing.   You get 1 troop choice and exactly 1 upgrade available taking your unit to a convenient 200pts per 10.   Sergeant with different statlines? Nope?   Shooting more than one weapon… Nope.    Differing saves?  Nope. Transport Nope. The Necron Warrior units simplicity was vital to a new player entering the game.   You got exactly what you paid for and you played it in a basic format.

As a new player, instead of staring at which special weapon to use or figuring out a special rule (WBB aside) you spent time “Playing your army”.   It allowed you to realize when your weapons were effective and when they weren’t. You couldn’t be snowed into thinking your Warrior unit was effective combat because you got off a combi-flamer round as you assaulted a horde of orks charging into HTH.

You learned how to move with your unit, you realized that despite WBB and Res Orbs you were vulnberable.   Sit, Fire and figure out how to get outta Dodge city before you were assaulted.

2) Terrible Elites (and expensive – metal).

Terrible Elites goes hand in hand w/ Lack of troop option to make the current codex a winner.   Heck, even if you wanted to try and field a unit of something, the net cost of 10 Pariahs or Flayed ones stayed your hand.    So you were left to migrate back to your troops.

3) One Vehicle.

Sure AV14, Living metal is pretty much awesome. It was mobile terrain for your force as you tried to pull positioning. You could use it to move troops into more conducive areas of the battlefield.   Net benefit was that you learned the effectiveness of mobility.   I never spammed Monos, probably should have but felt that good players rarely looked at them to take out being much more interested in Phase out.   Advent of the DOA armies served to reinforce this as well.

4) Simple FA choices.

Wraiths had a great stat line and hard as nails in HTH, Destroyer platforms really benefited from multiple units and Scarabs were great tarpits and providing cover as needed.   The only issue with the FA choices is that they rarely could be used in conjunction with one another, totally lacking in any synergy.    Wraiths worked well in 2 or 3 units of 3+ and Destroyers in 2 or 3 units of 4/5.

5) Ease of painting.

Lets be honest. Is there an army that you can get to the table faster and have look great?     I bought a Necron Phalanx left over from the Apoc push for around $150 bucks.   Assembled, painted and based in a weekend.   While I am not a NOOB painter, I can see the attraction of this army to someone who is.   It is tough to do really sexy necrons but they don’t have to be ultra original.
- assemble
- Prime Black
- Nickel metal spray (Krylon)
- Badab black
- Green Detail: Dark Angels Green, Goblin Green Highlight, Scorpion Green Highlight
- Sand and Paint the base. VIOLA… Necrons in weeked.
6) Getting Pasted.

Nothing teaches you to play a game like getting pasted a few times and I was pasted a ton with my ‘Crons. Eventually I got better and even won a game or two. I considered it a good game if I was able to hold my own even the game was a late turn loss to a quality player. The difference between losing with Crons vesus a more complex codex (Space Marines) is that I learned more about the game. When I’d lose with Space Marines (my other starter army) I was often confused to the reason. Was it my play on the table or my inability to construct a unit/army in an efficient manner. The Necron simplicity took the issue of army construction mostly out of your hands allowing you to focus on your play. Reasons why I lost were more easily identified and correct for future games.

So the point of my rambling is that while the 3ed Necron codex is ready to be put out to pasture it serverd a purpose for me and a purpose for the game. The game needs an easy entry army. Not easy to win with, but easy to play, that doesn’t “overcomplicate” things until you get the basics down. As a more seasoned player now, I wouldn’t give up the options that are coming for the boys in metal. But maybe, just maybe….GW needs to consider how they introduce the game in simpler manner to new players as codices grow more complex.
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Diary of a WarGame Wife: Welcome to Geekville!

Posted on July 29, 2011 by The Irishman

I am the wife of a gamer.

Yes, that means I have been to a game store on a Friday night, I understand what a “sprue” is and what a “conversion” is on a figure. I know that there are MANY factions of Space Marines (even though I tend to mix up their names when my husband talks about them) and that all pieces for a board game need to be very neatly organized in a board game box even if that means you have to make your own tuck boxes. I know that anything, including an oddly shaped piece of mulch outside of Nordstrom, can become a base for a figure. And that any container can be used to organized game pieces or “bits”.

Must. Farm. Gold.

My husband wasn’t always a gamer. He came out of the gaming closet in college after a trip to the comic store where he was reinspired by the comics of his youth, which lead to war gaming, his first attempts and now love for painting minis, and his uncontrollable urge for popping out the pieces to a new board game. Sure, being married to a gamer has its good and bad points just like any hobby. There are times when I don’t think he left the computer desk for days when a new version of WoW came out (yes, I know these acronyms!). There was a while when he would go through “phases,” as I would call them, where he would try a new game or army and buy EVERY expansion possible for them…only to find out that either there was no way in hell I was going to play it, or that we didn’t have ANY room for it in our tiny apartment and sold it all a week later. There are a lot of things that a gaming wife has to understand. Kind of an unwritten code to dealing with the hobby. The hobby almost becomes an obsession which my husband has never thrown on me but has giving me opportunities to understand it.

Grandma's busting out the whoop ass--deal with it.

I was never one for games as a kid. I was a dancer and gymnast and didn’t really have the patience to sit still and do anything let alone let alone play video games (didn’t have the hand eye coordination for that but that is another story) or to play games. The extent of my game playing was Scrabble with my parents, rummy with my grandmother, and the occasional game of Monopoly against my sisters, which I always won by pure luck, of course! (Where’d you get the pink 50’s grandma?)

I think my first board game experience came with the game Ticket to Ride. He brought it home after hearing about it from his friend who worked at a game store. We played it and I discovered that I LOVE to compete against him! It was a new thriving energy in our relationship. It also helps that he has HORRIBLE luck with dice rolling. Playing board games for us is a time to be unplugged from the world: from bills, work, friends, and drama. It is just the two of us and a time for us to enjoy each other even during the roughest moments. Since then, I have played MANY games! I tend to enjoy the euro games (ones with wood cubes as I called them at first). I also like games that are competitive in nature. I’m not one for the cooperative games since I tend to blame everyone else if we lose! I am willing to try new games but my lack of patience can be trying for anyone to teach me a new game, especially my husband, because it usually results in me accusing of him conveniently forgetting to teach me a rule.

Despite my husband’s surreptitious attempts, I have not yet tried table top war games. I think that this is because there is always a fine line that can be crossed in the gaming world from “geek chic” to the “escape pod of dorkdom,” and I fear that pushing around plastic army men force me across that line. I think I am still like many others out there trapped in the stereotype that gamers are scary… even though I’ve learned over the years, they aren’t. In fact, they are usually the nicest, most caring, and thoughtful people I’ve ever met… as long as they have gamer wives to pull them back into reality.

Editors Note: The WarGame Wife is a 20-something elementary school teacher that dabbles in gaming, and will assuredly be popping her tabletop wargame cherry at GenCon 2011. Look for her running diary as she experiences her first gaming convention.

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[Friday Freewrite] Harry Potter & the Cultural Phenomenon

Posted on July 21, 2011 by The Irishman

Recently my co-workers and I had a discussion about the movies that really defined our childhoods. The Star Wars trilogy was the prevailing answer for these 40-somethings, while, at 28, I had a much harder time defining it. I thought about it and came to the conclusion that, if there was any movie series or trilogy that was concretely memorable from the pre-adolescent days, it was the Back to the Future trilogy. The problem is that I remember it more for advancing my burgeoning love of music (there’s video of me singing “Power of Love” while riding my bike around our cul-de-sac when I was 4 or 5) and less due to Marty McFly and his time-bending shenanigans

Will not actually make your Delorian travel through time.

with Doc Brown. There is no doubt that Back to the Future has left an indelible impression on geek culture—I mean, who doesn’t know what a Flux Capacitor is—but for me it doesn’t inspire that same nostalgia that Star Wars does for my colleagues. It forced me to really examine the movies I grew up with; surely there was one series that became that cross-generational event like Star Wars was.

The movies from my childhood that I remember, I mean vividly remember, are almost all ones that had some connection with the cartoons I loved growing up in the late-80s. Let’s be honest. We had some of the most kickass cartoons in the history of Saturday morning. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some Phineus & Ferb, but that show doesn’t hold a candle to the smorgasbord of awesomesauce that we had laid on our table: Inspector Gadget, Transformers, He-Man & the Masters of the Universe, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, G.I. Joe, Thundercats, The Smurfs, Duck Tales, Gummi Bears, Alvin & the Chipmunks and Muppet Babies. And that’s just an introductory list, with a huge chance that I left off some of your favorites. Based on that, there should have been at least one solid, memorable movie franchise to spawn from it, right? Wrong.

The NBA lockout hasn't been kind to Dirk Nowitski.

A live action He-Man came out starring Dolph Lundgren. It was awful. The first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Movie was actually pretty damned good. It kept a lot of the graphic novel roots while still appealing to 10-year olds like me that hadn’t yet discovered the glorious black & white work of Eastman & Laird. And then this happened in Secret of the Ooze. Don’t get my wrong, as I too consider myself a bit of a lyrical pro (though I’ve no longer enough hair to benefit from the ragtop down in my 5.0) and can appreciate a fellow wordsmith, but Mr. Van Winkle had no business being in a TMNT movie. While not quite the abomination that He-Man was, the Ninja Turtles series just didn’t have the staying power. In my mind, the best movie to come from the 80s cartoons bounty was the original animated Transformers: The Movie. The movie was epic. In addition to the immortal Peter Cullen, it had Orson Wells, Leonard Nimoy, Robert Stack, and Judd Nelson voicing characters. It had a perfect soundtrack for an 80s movie about transforming cars, highlighted by Stan Bush’s “The Touch.” It is the movie from my childhood from that I most often revisit. But it wasn’t culture defining, nor was it an event. And that makes me sad. With the wealth of high-quality inspiration from these 80s cartoons—and this clearly remains true, as five of the series I mentioned have received movie adaptations within the last ten years—nothing lasting could be gleaned.

And that’s why I envy anyone under 20. They have Harry Potter. Harry Potter is an unquestionable phenomenon with far-reaching cultural impact in the exact same vein as Star Wars; I’d actually argue, due to the fact that the series has enticed millions of children worldwide to read, that the series has been of even greater importance. Geek blasphemy, I know, but since the real crux of the discussion here is movies, you can ignore that statement if you’d like.

There are some movie series that I think I’ve benefitted from being older during their release. I was in college at the height of both the Lord of the Rings and Matrix trilogies. I was able to appreciate the time and energy that was invested by Peter Jackson in adapting Tolkien’s world, especially when contrasting it to the novels I was reading in a class about Joseph Campbell and the hero’s journey.

Whoa. He's talking about philosophy...

I was able to understand the Wachowski’s philosophical purpose in the Matrix, particularly when I viewed it in regards to Descartes, Kant, and other works on metaphysics. These were certainly thought provoking and mind-expanding endeavors, but they didn’t have the same lasting effect that things from my childhood do, nor did they have the kind of cultural impact that the Harry Potter movies have.

I realize that I’ve been alive and in my prime during the Potter ascension, but, for whatever reason, it isn’t quite the same as if I’d grown up with Harry. I started reading the Potter books as a senior in high school in 2001, promptly after seeing the first movie. I’ve effectively been on board with the series for the entire ride. My Potter-cred goes so far that I’ve seen the past six movies at midnight with a group of friends. But I see the difference at the theatres: my experience as a 28-year old man isn’t the same as the 18-year old that grew up with Harry, and it makes me jealous. There’s something about experiencing a cultural phenomenon as you’re growing up that is markedly different than when you’re an adult. Whether it is the naïveté and hope that comes with youth—and yes, I know I’m still comparatively young—when contrasted with the cynicism that festers within us as we grow older, there is a difference. I don’t know quite what it is, but it’s a different experience. Perhaps the missing ingredient is what the Harry Potter movies are all about: magic. We lose a bit of that magic with each passing year, and therefore the cultural experience of a movie series like Harry Potter isn’t quite as profound as it would be were we younger and with a bit more magic in us.

So as I sat in that theatre on July 15^th with the same five people I had for the previous six Harry Potter movies, I could tell it was the end of something. For Warner Brothers, it marked the beginning of the end for a money-printing machine. For the people that grew up with Harry, and I mean really grew up (those 18-22 year olds), it marked a very real end to a journey through adolescence, one they shared with Harry Potter. For me, it marked the last time I’d have a good excuse to go to a movie theatre at 10pm on a work night with my friends and my wife. It marked the last time I’d have an excuse to get misty-eye because a house elf sacrificed himself for his friends. More so, it marked the last time I’d be able to sit and experience that kind of cultural magic.

This entry was posted in Opinion and tagged 80s Cartoons, Deathly Hallows, GI Joe, gummi bears, Harry Potter, JK Rowling, Lord of the Rings, Muggles, Peter Jackson, Smurfs, Star Wars, The Matrix, Thundercats, Transformers. Bookmark the permalink.