And so, in a similar vein to Good Gaming Friday, I'll be posting up reviews of new/classic albums, beginning with:
Oracular Spectacular is an introspective album, looking back at childhood and aspects of youth, and the realisation of eventually having to grow old and enter the 'real world'. By no means is this a concept album, there's no story to tell, but there's a link between many of the songs, such as 'Time To Pretend', 'The Youth' and 'The Handshake' that ties into this progression through life. Placing poignant messages aside however, is the music up to scratch as well? The album's opener, and lead single for the album, 'Time To Pretend' is a cacophony of contrasting synthesisers, thundering and twee at the same times, and an off-beat drum beat, that meld into one seamless whole with the vocals, leading to a potential candidate for single of the year.
The energy present in the opener is felt in other songs such as 'Electric Feel', a disco-esque stomper, and 'Kids', another blast of electronic melancholy. In other songs, conventional instruments come into play, 'Weekend Warriors' is a semi-psychedelic trip to the mock battles most of us played when we were younger, and the sound of 'Pieces of What' harks back to the sound of classic rock musicians, such as Roy Orbison or Buddy Holly, whilst still sounding modern and up-to-date.
However, there some low-points to the album, the album closer 'Future Reflections' is somewhat of a letdown after the vibrant energy that precedes it, and 'Of Moons, Birds & Monsters' feels rather like filler content than anything else. Overall though, the album is a worthy purchase as both a pop and an goatee-stroker purchase, which almost never fails to impress.
Song To Download: Time To Pretend
Song To Skip Past: Of Moons, Birds & Monsters
Overall Score: 8/10
The UK Nationals are nearly here, and the prize support is looking top-notch already, and it hasn't even all been announced yet! Today, it was made known that there'll be at least a whopping 300 extended-art cards given away as prizes. Just to impress that upon you, Three Hundred. This is on top of a whole other bunch of promo cards, playmats, t-shirts and booster packs. You name it, it's being given away. Except for that, you dirty-minded scamp.
Now, I just need to get some serious testing done over the week, and hope my card-sleeves get here through the post before Friday.
As part of my attempt to have my blog updated as much as possible, welcome to my first Good Gaming Friday. In this (hopefully) weekly article, I'll take a look at the game which has impressed upon me the most in the past week, or a look at some classic games which deserve mentioning. This week's inaugural edition kicks off with Sanitarium on the PC.
Sanitarium is a point-and-click adventure game, released in 1998, which features the player as an inmate of an insane asylum, who wakes up with game-convenient-amnesia in the midst of an evacuation, due to a fire in another section of the asylum. Straight off, the game's rich atmosphere hits you in a face like a brick wall, thanks to the inmate who's hitting his face against a brick wall nearby, and the cowering gibbering wrecks of your other fellow detainees. To get things straight, which is a slight oxymoron with this game, Sanitarium does it's level-most best to keep the player perpetually in the dark about your own character's sanity, with a constant barrage of surreal locations and situations, as well as flashbacks to the character's past which begin to reveal why you're there...or possibly not. You can expect to see sadistic laboratories, villages inhabited only by children, an incredibly evil-looking circus, and meet half-cyborg bugs fighting against a race of four-armed cyclops(es/i?)
Despite sounding like it could be an incoherent mess, the developers, DreamForge, have produced a tight narrative spanning nine chapters, and multiple characters, which all manages to neatly tie together by the ending cinematic. Seeing how the main character's story and some of your fellow inmate's delusions intertwine is a delight, though some of the characters you encounter do seem rather inconsequential to the grand scheme of things. One downside of the game is the variable quality of the voice-acting, with some characters being laughably bad, and others atmospherically perfect. The musical score however, is top-notch, and fits seamlessly with every location and event.
Overall, Sanitarium is a game that provides a good few evening's worth of twisted entertainment (I personally took around 12 hours to complete it, thanks to some 'duh' moments with the puzzles), and deserves at least a try.
Pros: Highly atmospheric. Great locations, characters, and music.
Cons: Some corny voice-acting, short play-time.
Link to Sanitarium demo (also includes patch for full game).
Over on VS Realms, there's been a link to a pre-release auction for Marvel Universe booster boxes/cases. This has come as a bit of a shock, as from previous reports, the set wasn't expected until May/June. Whilst it's good for the game that new cards are coming into the market sooner than expected, I'm worried about my lack of significant funds until the end of April, and whether UDE has another limited print-run for this set, as with Marvel and DC Legends.
Whilst I'm not saying this is a bad thing at all, it's just something that's now going to be a slight problem if there are 'problems' at UDE's end. Oh well, at least it's being released, that's the main thing. Think positive!
In other news, I've been testing my Brotherhood BYOS deck, and it's holding it's own, even against Silver Age/Modern Age decks which have more versatility. I also played against it this evening, in one of two games introducing a female friend of mine to playing VS, and by goodness, it knocked the bejeezus out of my Doomed Earth deck. I've got high hopes for the UK Championship, and though I'm not expecting to come in 1st Place, I'm confident that I'll be able to Top 8.
Over and out.
Whilst this blog was originally created for ramblings and putting up new demos of my music, the latter never really came to fruition, as I haven't recorded anything new since last Spring. However, now that it's Spring again, the song-writing buzz is back, and I've started work on the third demo-album, with the intro track, Blue.
Obviously, this is a work-in-progress, so some sound levels need adjusting. Plus, I'll be changing the bass in the first two choruses, as listening back, it just doesn't work.
To kick things off, after the unexpected announcement of Vssystem.com's daily articles being shelved, the VS community has rallied together to carry on providing top-notch articles through the use of our individual blogs. Some were already in existence, such as stubarnes' Full.Body.Transplant., whilst new blogs have sprung up, washed in with the sudden tide of enthusiasm for our superb hobby, including WalterKovac's Rorschach Ink Blog. And if it couldn't possibly get any better than that, Kamiza has provided us all with a central hub so we don't ever miss out on a blog again. (My RSS feed bar is getting rather full now, as I guess many other's are too!) Bravo, sir.
Now, on to this article's deck. Whilst I've presented a similar deck before, it was focused solely on the X-Men. Whilst that's certainly no bad thing, especially as I wouldn't have anything to blog about otherwise, it was time to spread my horizons, and to reach far, far away from them. To be specific, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Okay, so maybe not that far away, but they've been the X-Men's primary foes ever since Issue #4 back in 1964, even if the relationship between the two teams has been a rather osmotic one.
So, on to the actual deck itself. Everyone knows the first and foremost aim of VS System is to have fun. The second aim is to win. And the third is to STUN AS MUCH AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE. Well, it is for me anyhows. If all of your opponent's characters are stunned, then you can go right ahead, and start applying straight-to-the-face damage with your characters. So, with an uncanny team-up of X-Men and the Brotherhood, I present:
The Stun-Nine-Eight.
Characters.
3x Multiple Man (MXM)
3x Multiple Man (MVL)
4x Gambit, Swamp Rat
4x Xorn, Shen Xorn
4x Magneto, Mutant Terrorist
4x Magneto, Mutant Supreme
4x Rogue, Power Absorption
2x Wolverine, The Best At What He Does
2x Mammomax, Maximus Jensen
1x Sentinel Mark VII, Repurposed
1x Spiral, Freedom Force
1x Juggernaut, The Unstoppable
1x Magneto, Master of Magnetism
Plot Twists.
4x Fastball Special
4x Children of The Atom
3x The 198, Team-Up
4x Savage Beatdown
3x X-Men Assemble
3x Mobilize
3x Finishing Move
Locations.
2x Xavier's Institute of Higer Learning
As stated above, the intention is to cause as much stun potential as possible, hopefully clearing the board for another character to attack the opponent directly. Multiple Man is there to provide both discard-fodder for cards such as Gambit and Children of The Atom, and also to be placed bravely in the front line for Fastball Special.
Also included are cards to help deal with any stuns that come my way. Aside from the aforementioned C.O.T.A, X-Men Assemble means that when characters recover, they gain a +1/+1 counter. Placing multiple copies of this into my Resource Row should mean low-cost characters can still stay with the curve as the game enters the mid-section. Xorn allows a free recovery during the Recovery Phase, Wolverine reovers himself anyway, and it doesn't really matter too much if Mammomax gets stunned.
The ideal opening hand to open on, and mulligan for, is one with The 198 Team-Up card, an X-Men Assemble, and Gambit. The 198 card is near-essential to making sure this deck runs smoothly, otherwise the various (X)-related effects are harder to pull off. If you're really hell-bent on getting that Team-Up, you can always pack a few copies of Teamwork to search it out with. Anything else is handy and goes towards the stun-tastic experience to follow.
