sportsdirect: Forever Geek

Saturday, December 31, 2011

Forever Geek

Battleship Galaxies: A classic game with a futuristic twist
No Half-Life 3 For You
Weekly Poll: What Did You Get For Christmas?

Battleship Galaxies: A classic game with a futuristic twist

Posted: 31 Dec 2011 02:03 AM PST

I got what I wanted for Christmas. I’ve always been curious about a 2011 re-issue of Battleship but my mind was blown when Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast took the classic game I used to play when I was a kid and added a lot more depth into a foray in outer space.

Battleship Galaxies: The Saturn Offensive is a tabletop miniature game that pulls you into a player vs player game of Battleship with a twist. Though it’s fit for two players, there are prepared scenarios for two teams for a total of four players.

The contents consist of a several well built miniatures (themed for two factions), stands, two hex-based boards and action cards which players draw at the start of every turn. As a bonus, the game comes with a graphic novel detailing the backstory. And it’s quite a read as it is made by IDW.

Just like in the original Battleship, the ship miniatures are divided into classes. The difference here is that just like in Warhammer, you’re allotted a set number of points at the start of the game and you can consume these points to launch ships. Better ships cost more points. And, just like in the classic implementation, the game comes with two well made dividers to hide your ship roster from the enemy.

[Photo above c/o BoardGameGeek]

Battleship Galaxies is fairly easy to learn. You draw cards, launch ships, consume energy points to perform actions and destroy enemy ships to win the game. Yes it’s pretty straightforward but the strategy involves a lot of energy management to accomplish objectives (your entire fleet shares the same energy pool, which makes it rather difficult to micromanage) and positioning your ships to flank your opponent.

As someone fond of house rules, Battleship Galaxies is easily mod-dable and theoretically can scale pretty well if you play with two or more sets. This would consist of expanding the playing field and setting starting energy levels a lot higher per turn (you only gain 10 points per turn which isn’t a lot considering it takes about 15 points to launch your capital ship — and that’s just to launch it!)

All in all, Battleship Galaxies isn’t anything like your old school classic. In fact you don’t need to have previous knowledge of any of its iterations to learn this game. It’s quite a standalone and pretty new (released middle of this year). If you’re up for small one on one board games, Battleship Galaxies is something you need to pick up.

Battleship Galaxies: The Saturn Offensive
BUY NOW — USD $ 40.00 – $55.00

No Half-Life 3 For You

Posted: 30 Dec 2011 01:04 PM PST

The recent rumors flying around about Half-Life 3 being in active development with an announcement imminent, are total crap. But despite this, Valve is working on Half-Life. Just what iteration of Half-Life they’re working on is anybody’s guess, though. Let’s run down the possibilities.

The rumors are everywhere you look: “Valve is working on Half-Life 3! Valve is running an Alternate Reality Game to start early buzz for Half-Life 3!” And on and on. But with one simple post on the Steam forums, Valve writer Chet Faliszek has dashed our hopes for the third game in the genre-defining series.

Or have they?

Here are the facts. Six years passed between the release of the original Half-Life and Half-Life 2. It’s now been a little over seven years since the release of Half-Life 2. The Half-Life series is Valve’s best-known, biggest money-making franchise. Is there a single gamer alive who hasn’t played Half-Life or one of its spin-offs? (Portal would not exist without Half-Life, nor would Team Fortress 2.) It’s nothing less than the cornerstone of Valve’s entire business.

There is absolutely no way on earth that Valve is not working on something new for this iconic series.

But what??

Is it the long-delayed Half-Life 2: Episode 3? Quick history lesson: Following HL2‘s release in late 2004, the game’s story continued with a pair of add-on episodes, the second of which was released way back in 2007. At least one further episode was announced, but has become vaporware. Was Episode 3 a victim of FPS technology advancing too far beyond Valve’s Source engine to make it viable? Is it, against all odds, still in production — making it at least three years late? Or was it cancelled altogether, in favor of something else on Valve’s plate?

And what about Half-Life 3? No third entry in the series is unthinkable. Yet we’ve gone seven long years without so much as a whispered rumor coming out of Valve’s impenetrable fortress. Even these recent rumblings wound up being nothing more than an (understandably) over-eager fan community’s wishful thinking.

The Episodes marked a major shift in Valve’s game release strategy from standard boxed disc releases to downloads. But the endless delay in the third episode has led most fans to believe that Valve failed to meet their revenue goals with the first two, forcing them to reexamine this strategy. Earlier this year, Valve head honcho Gabe Newell told Develop Magazine that he had been forced to reconsider the episodic releases. “We went through the episodes phase, and now we’re going towards shorter and even shorter cycles,” he said. “For me, ‘entertainment as a service’ is a clear distillation of the episodic content model.” What do you suppose this means? Is Valve thinking of moving to a persistent online world with the franchise? Or has he got something unprecedented in mind?

But back in 2010, in an interview with MTV Geek, Newell alluded to a Half-Life 3 when he said in regards to the series, “I feel like we’ve gotten away from genuinely scaring the player more than I’d like, and it’s something we need to think about.”

So there you have it. We will get more Half-Life. But only Valve and Gabe Newell know what and when that will be — and frustratingly, they’re not in any hurry to talk about it.

Weekly Poll: What Did You Get For Christmas?

Posted: 30 Dec 2011 12:04 PM PST

View This Poll

Another year, another Christmas. So what did Santa Claus bring you this year? The latest and greatest gadget? Your favorite movie or video game? Something else?

On Christmas Eve night, my family and I went for a drive to look at Christmas lights, and while in one of the higher-end neighborhoods in town, we passed a house with a car in the garage that actually had a giant red bow on top. I thought that only happened in TV commercials.

Anyway, for this poll, you can select up to three answers. If you choose “other,” please tell us what you got in the Comments below.