What is Best in Life

I’ve talked about board games before, and in that post I discussed how there are a ton of games out there with simple rules, short playing times and fun strategic choices that are all far better than the ”roll the dice and move” games you find at Walmart.  Well, this post will not be about those games, today we’ll be talking about war games, and if you want an example of how much fun your typical war game has sucked out of your innocent “board game”, look no further than the fact that most war game adherents prefer to call them “consims” (conflict simulations) rather than anything with the word “game” in it. 

So, today we’ll be leaving the land of having a good time hanging with some friends around a table and entering the land of bearded middle aged history buffs squinting at enormous maps covered in tiny counters in their basements. Abandon hope all ye who click “more”. (more…)

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not entirely fair in my reviews of movies with a strong message.  It doesn’t matter how delicately the filmmaker has incorporated their “message” into their film, as soon as I get a whiff of proselytizing I immediately find my opinion of the film is lowered.  It is important to keep in mind that I am making the distinction here between the filmmaker showing their view of the world (something every filmmaker should do) as opposed to attempting to change the audience’s view of the world (something I feel should not be overtly attempted).

While discussing this with a friend, the point was made that while the purpose of art should not necessarily be to inform, “the role of art for the artist is self-expression, so objection to their doing so in a political or otherwise partisan way is disingenuous”.  Which is a good point, one that I will look into in greater depth here today to find out just what it is about everything from I was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang to The Lost Weekend that immediately turns me off. (more…)

When I wrote my last flash games post I was still of the mindset that “Tower Defense” games were lame.  For those who have never heard of them, playing a Tower Defense game is similar to playing a real time strategy game (like Command and Conquer, Warcraft, Starcraft, Age of Empires, etc) where you only build towers to defend your home base against an ever growing horde of enemy attacks.  The typical Tower Defense game will have an overhead perspective and confine “attacks” to a road (usually leading to the heart of your “base” or off screen) along which you will place various towers to shoot at the “wave” of enemies (“creeps” in Tower Defense lingo).  As you kill enemies you are rewarded with money to buy more towers to help combat the next wave of tougher enemies.

Now, I initially had no interest in playing these kind of games.  It seemed like the only decision you made was where to put a tower and then you sat back and watched the game play itself as the towers automatically shot the enemies for you.  And to be fair, there are tons of these kind of games out there, and the vast majority do just that.  But I have also found the rare few that not only managed to get the difficulty curve mostly balanced (Tower Defense games are all about building enough towers to stay ahead of the toughness of the creeps–and this game balance is surprisingly hard to maintain), included interesting towers that upgraded in fun ways (the Tower Defense genre is all about slowly improving your defenses–this is a lot more fun when your defenses do progressively cooler things than just “shoot more”), and best of all, required a bit of strategy in your tower choices and placement (ie, something more than “close to the road”).

So here is my list of my favorite Tower Defense Games.  The top 3 are highly recommended, 4-8 are pretty good and the last 2 are at least worth checking out if you really need more Tower Defense games.  Anyway, for those that would like to waste dozens of hours of their life, read on! (more…)

Hello dear readers, it’s MAILBAG MONDAY again!  On this special day I will search through my mountain of reader mail and answer the five most pressing questions!

What’s that you say?  Do I really get that much mail?  Well, I’ll admit…the contact section of this website doesn’t get used that often, but, one of the perks of wordpress stats is that I can see the google search terms that people use to find my site.  And I’m going to go ahead and pretend that these search terms will count as reader mail, since they are often entered in the form of a question.  So as you read these, remember that each “question” was something that someone actually typed into google that brought up my site as a hit which they then clicked on thus letting wordpress stats report to me the search they used to find my site.  I could make up the questions myself, but it turns out the actual google searches are far better than anything I could come up with!

This time I answer the questions:

• Top 10 worst fart smells?
• I can heal like wolverine.
• Easy origami instructions to make wolverine?
• A short fairy tale?
• Isley vomit infestation?

So, without further ado, it is time to dig into the old Mailbag to see what kind of things have been on my reader’s minds in the last month! (more…)

Here are some two sentence reviews of the movies I watched in October.

Stats

• Movies watched – 35
• Movies that were new to me – 24
• New record for 80s movies watched – 10
• Monthly Masterpieces - Black Narcissus, Love Me Tonight, Raging Bull

(more…)