Author: Shmee

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Shmee Rides Some Trains In The Land Of The Rising Sun!

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Did you know that I play board games sometimes?  Well I do, and I recently won a great one at PAX West: Trains: Rising Sun.  It is what happens if you take a progressive deck building game like Dominion and mash it up with Ticket to Ride.  If that sounds at all fun to you let me assure you that it is.

The game is pretty simple to follow.  Train cards have a basic value, and you use that value to either buy more cards that do all sorts of things or build your train empire on the game board.  No matter what you do you seem to take on waste cards.  How you manage all those waste cards generally determines if you win the game or not.  Whoever has built the best train or got the best cards to give them the most victory points at the end wins.

The game is easy to learn, and there are enough card combinations that I am sure that I will not master it for a while.  Trains: Rising Sun is technically the sequel/expansion to Trains, so if you already have Trains and you are just looking for more boards and cards, Rising Sun will give you more gameplay options.  As someone who just has Rising Sun, I don’t feel like the game is incomplete without the original Trains.  Though I am thinking of picking it up because I like Rising Sun so much that having more cards and boards sounds great.

If you like progressive deck building games or Ticket to Ride, but you are looking for something new Trains: Rising Sun gets my highest recommendation.  It is a lot of fun, and I can’t wait to play it again.  If you already have Trains, but you just want more, Rising Sun will do that for you.  All in all AEG did a great job with Trains: Rising Sun.

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Shmee Visits Atlanta!

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I had no idea what to expect from Atlanta (the new TV show on FX not the city).  On one hand I only knew Donald Glover from Community, and that show was a crazy slapstick comedy, but on the other the commercials for Atlanta were all just slow city pans.  It turns out that Atlanta is a dramedy about three broke guys just trying to get ahead in titular Atlanta.

FX cleaned up this year at the Emmys, and it looks like Atlanta will help them do it again next year.  Shows with poverty and racism have been done before, but Atlanta just lays it out there.  It doesn’t overly dramatize it, but it doesn’t back away from it either.  It is simply the reality that these three young rappers are dealing with, and we are along for the ride.  Shows like this usually aren’t funny, but Atlanta definitely is, just in a more darkly observant and realistic fashion.

Atlanta is a great show, and an important one.  It is no wonder that FX has already renewed it for season two.  I will be watching, and if you are of age (it is TV MA due to langue) you should be too.

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Dear Developers, Don’ Use ‘Retro’ Save Systems!

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Thanks to Games with Gold I recently acquired Earthlock: Festival of Magic by Snowcastle Games, and while I was never a big JRPG fan there was something about the old school presentation of Earthlock that perfectly triggered my nostalgia nerve center.  Well it did until I ran in to a boss that I wasn’t ready for, and since I hadn’t seen a green save frog in a long time it wiped out an hour’s worth of play time.   I returned the favor by wiping it off my Xbox One’s hard drive.

To all the developers out there please use modern saving schemes.  I understand that Earthlock was trying to harken back to a simpler time, but the reason saving was terrible back then was because they didn’t know any better, or there was a limitation with their software.  No one pines for the days when they would have to play the same hard area over and over again because they were stuck between save points.  No, our brains forget those play sessions so we don’t turn in to uncontrollable rage monsters.  At the very minimum include a retry button so that we can get through the boss and get to a save point.

Oh well, other then the save game deal I have nothing else to write about Earthlock: Festival of Magic since I didn’t play it enough to properly review it because I literally uninstalled it.  I have a lot of other games to play, and they respect my time enough to save my game at regular intervals.

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Dead Rising, The Game I Should Love…

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Dead Rising turns 10 this year, and to celebrate Capcom is re-releasing the old games and the new Dead Rising 4.  When the original Dead Rising was announced for the for the Xbox 360 I was supper excited.  It was like they reached inside my brain and then created a game just for me.  I mean it was a game where you could use just about anything for a weapon while roaming around a large open mall that was infested with the undead, and the game delivered on that promise.  However, it also delivered a constantly ticking clock so that you could not take your time to enjoy all the free form zombie killing action, a terrible save system, and bosses that were next to impossible to defeat.  I don’t think I have ever been more disappointed in a game.

It turns out I am not the only one who felt this way, so they had to make drastic changes to the next Dead Rising games.  Because of that I hear that things got better in the second and third games, and that they are completely getting rid of the countdown clock in the upcoming Dead Rising 4, but after the way the first game let me down it is hard to get excited about the franchise again.  Who knows maybe Dead Rising 4 will be the zombie game that gets everything right, but unless I get the game as a gift I won’t find out.  It is hard to trust something that has broken your heart.