I Scream – Penny Arcade

For some reason, both of our youngest wanted to watch Scream on Halloween separately. Even from the jump, it might not scare them, but there is a… cruelty in some of these older horror movies that must have been surprising even if it’s not jump-scare scary. Scream in particular is a weird movie; not in a bad way, but it’s doing some genre examination while it executes a strong premise. I’m sort of a horror fan, if the last couple sentences didn’t give it away. Gabriel is, well, not.

Because I don’t like to steal cool moments from you when you are learning a game – which to me is the most exhilarating part – I mostly just try to let you know when something cool is happening, content that the unnatural hungers of this audience will find their satisfaction. But there’s more details on Pokemon TCG Pocket and Mantic’s Halo: Flashpoint that are worth going into.

– For Pokeman, let me show you them. As I suggested, deckbuilding does completely away with the Energy cards which are that game’s mana equivalent. Traditional deckbuilding in that game involves creating a sixty card deck, which can have no more than four copies of a single card. Pocket decks are twenty cards total, with a limitation of two copies per card. That’s all what it is; you can make decks really fast in this game, and knowing you’ll only ever need two copies of a card for a deck means that when they unlock Trading – currently a grayed out area – most people will have some fodder.

One mechanic Pocket doesn’t carry over is Prize Cards. I mention this for two reasons: one, it’s an amazing mechanic that I love and shows up in a few Japanese TCGs that Kiko and I play. Essentially, at the beginning of the game, you remove six cards from your deck and place them along the side. You earn these cards when you defeat your opponent’s Pokemon, which is already fun. But two, it – like the traditional Energy system – stymies deck construction just enough to keep the game from being Solved. For energy, you don’t always get the energy you want in Pocket so that’s sort of retained. But the kind of decks you can make without Prize cards, even just at twenty cards, are mean as hell. You will wonder why these cute monsters are making you feel so bad.

– Having played more Halo: Flashpoint, I think this thing has serious legs – and not just because the storied MJOLNIR combat exoskeleton bolsters a Spartan’s agility. There is a mechanic I didn’t discuss because I hoped you might find it, like a river agate, and clutch it close to your bosom. I’m starting to think that when I talk about a game, I should just talk about it and not try to tantalize you with negative space or whatever the fuck.

First, let me thank them again for the Recon Edition. Understand that all my good vibes are coming from literally the most truncated version of the experience – no Banished Elites, no terrain expansion, just a 4v4 mirror match in a variety of scenarios. We did a round of Slayer, which was a blast, and we just tried a round of Strongholds yesterday which I think was even more fun and made the tactical importance of respawning and where you choose to respawn a core mechanic. That’s not the mechanic I was talking about, though.

At the beginning of each round, you roll a set of dice the game calls Command Dice. In our games, we roll three of them – and each face of the die is essentially a free action you get to use during the round. The game has hard limits on what a model can do with its activation, common in the space; for example, all your actions have to be different ones. No double shooting, etcetera. Except the actions you get on these dice – things like an extra shot, an extra melee, some free movement, or even the ability to take two turns back to back – they’re like cheats, in a way. They don’t apply to the action limit at all! They’ve even found a way to make hacks feel at home on the table. Of course they’re on dice, so it’s not like you get to pick optimal ones, but figuring out where to time and slot these freebies makes the already rock-solid tactical core even more fresh and vital. Okay! Now I’m done.

(CW)TB out.