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  • Barnestorming #999- Tempest games in Review, DMC, Prophet

Barnestorming #999- Tempest games in Review, DMC, Prophet

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MB Updated
Barnestorming #999- Tempest games in Review, DMC, Prophet
There Will Be Games

Next of Barnes- Come, join us won't you?

On the Table

The dastard Ken B. scooped me- and my idea- of reviewing Love Letter and Courtier this week so I’m going to repay the favor by going ahead and reviewing ALL of the Tempest games in one stroke. How’s next week’s Next of Ken looking, you villain?

Anyway, I’m not sure that MOR Eurogames are the best way to build a shared game setting. Courtier and Mercante are OK with a couple of pretty damaging issues, Dominare is pretty bad. But oh yeah, Love Letter is amazing.

Playing LOTR LCG almost every day. I’ve determined that Escape from Dol Guldur is impossible. Having all of the cards makes a WORLD of difference in getting the most out of the solo game…and I actually think the game was sort of meant to be solo. Apart from a couple of scenarios that are practically impossible one or even two handed.

Review copies of Police Precinct, Exodus, and FINALLY Mice and Mystics on the way. I think Colby said he’d send me a copy of City of Remnants too, that should be neat.

 

On the Consoles

Haven’t been feeling ANYTHING lately but I fired up DMC last night and it’s got me. I guess all I needed to shake off video game doldrums this time was a brawler. It’s totally Devil May Cry. Tacky and ridiculous with awful Fear Factory music blaring the whole time. Combat is smooth and fun. Story is a preposterous mix of J-crap and They live. I’m loving it, don’t know if I’ll go the distance with it though. It’s WAY too easy. How are you gonna have a Devil May Cry boss and NOT  EVEN GET HIT ONE TIME the first time you fight it?

I do want to play Ni No Kuni next week, of course…but at the end of the day, it looks like a pretty stock Tales-style JRPG.

Only thing I’m really excited for right now is MGS: Revengeance. And Rayman Legends.

On IOS

Paging Allied Commander Matt Thrower, Allied Commander Matt Thrower please report for your spanking.

Time Surfer, ech. Tiny Wings with a bunch of silly crap added. Joe Danger Touch is pretty good, Super Mario meets Excitebike meets Trials. Temple Run 2 is in fact the sequel to Temple Run.

On the Comics Rack

Prophet. You really, really should read Prophet. It’s one of the best sci-fi comics out there. If you’ve ever thought “man, I wish there was something that could evoke that cool feeling I had back in 1982 of seeing some science fiction magazine with a cool font on it and slightly disturbing, weird artwork that I didn’t understand”, this is your book.  I love how casually the writer leaves out massive details and then later on it’s like “Oh, this guy? Born in the 1940s on Earth.  By the way.” Art is bad ass, very Moebius. Weird alien sex, gross eating, blobby creatures, general coolness…superb.

The latest Batman arc hit a peak with that whole “Death of the Family” thing…this week’s book was interesting, right up until the end where we get one of those fake “OMG is Batman dead?” moments. Joker is particularly nasty in this book, what with his face pretty much tied on and all. Gruesome stuff.

Rounding the last corner of Doom Patrol, finally. Into the sixth book. Candlemaker, wow. Spooky stuff. One thing that really bothers me about the book though is that there are a couple of references to The Dylans. Who, you say? Never mind. 1990s Britpop that we thought would never die.

Saga is awful. I tried it again after everybody in the world said it was the best comic of 2012. Shallow, trite, superficial bullshit with people written like ironic sitcom characters. Oh look. Brian Vaughn. Explains a lot.

Peter Panzerfaust…just read the first one, but I’ll get back to it. I had no idea what the concept was, even though it’s right there in the title. And I LOVE Peter Pan.

Finishing New Deadwardians this week and plowing through some more Sweet Tooth.

On the Screen

I somehow never saw Dead Man, the Jim Jarmusch picture with Johnny Depp. It’s pretty good, very funny. I’ve watched it a couple of times so I guess that means I like it. Great to see Mitchum in his twilight years.

Iron Sky…I tried. I really tried. You’d think that a picture with Udo Kier as a Nazi commandant would be worth sitting through, but it isn’t.

On Spotify

Really into The Blood right now, I never listened to them much before. Great records, at least their original 80s stuff.

I’m still stuck on this Oi!/streetpunk thing in general, rolled out Chelsea, Partisans, Toy Dolls, Peter & the Test Tube Babies, Menace, Gonads…

There Will Be Games
Michael Barnes (He/Him)
Senior Board Game Reviews Editor

Sometime in the early 1980s, MichaelBarnes’ parents thought it would be a good idea to buy him a board game to keep him busy with some friends during one of those high-pressure, “free” timeshare vacations. It turned out to be a terrible idea, because the game was TSR’s Dungeon! - and the rest, as they say, is history. Michael has been involved with writing professionally about games since 2002, when he busked for store credit writing for Boulder Games’ newsletter. He has written for a number of international hobby gaming periodicals and popular Web sites. From 2004-2008, he was the co-owner of Atlanta Game Factory, a brick-and-mortar retail store. He is currently the co-founder of FortressAT.com and Nohighscores.com as well as the Editor-in-Chief of Miniature Market’s Review Corner feature. He is married with two childen and when he’s not playing some kind of game he enjoys stockpiling trivial information about music, comics and film.

Articles by Michael

Michael Barnes
Senior Board Game Reviews Editor

Articles by Michael

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