Games
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OK, I warned you guys that I might have to do this from time to time. I’m shamelessly stealing the idea of my fellow staffers Micheal and Ken and having my own named column to talk about a whole grab-bag of crap alongside games. And I’m shamelessly stealing their idea of incorporating my name into the title too. When I stopped to think about how I could riff on my name, the choice of combining a weapon, Games Workshop games and a famous death metal band (even though I hate death metal, y’all seem to love it) was too good to miss in spite of the atrocious pun it represents. So welcome to the inaugural edition of Bolt Thrower - won’t be quite such a regular feature as Next of Ken or Barnestorming, but hopefully still the first of many.
Board Games
So the reason for this sudden change of heart is of course my columns up on NoHighScores. Sadly my days over there are Tuesday and Friday so I can’t give you a lovely fresh, glistening link to click on, just stale leftovers from the end of last week. But whenever I do a “big” board gaming piece on a Friday over there, you’ll get a Bolt Thrower over here the following Monday. Last Friday it was a review of one of my favourite games of all time, Titan, as well as a bit of a history lesson regarding the game. It’s quite refreshing having a clean slate to work with and a new audience - I can revisit all my favourite topics over again.
Mobile Games
I’ve been doing some stuff on iOS over on NoHighScores recently. So we’ll quickly mention that I’ve had a great time playing Galaxy on Fire 2 and 100 Rogues of late, both highly recommended. Getting a bit fed up with a lot of the board game adaptations and not sure what to get next. Ascension is very tempting. But then so is Imperial, although I should probably wait for the async play update.
Instead I’ll focus on the fact I’ve not a new Android phone and I’ve been exploring the games on that. I’ve been disappointed by the number of “free” games on Android that are actually ad-driven: I have no problem with the model for them as choose to use it, but I prefer to avoid adware because of the possible data charges it incurs, and I wish such titles were marked more clearly in the Android market.
The two best games I’ve found so far are not board games at all. The first is an ancient, creaking, pixellated RPG called Gurk. The interface sucks: you can’t even drive it with a touch screen, instead relying on outdated arrow buttons. And the gameplay is just kill-loot-repeat. But for all that it’s quite good fun, involving a lot of exploration and poking around, and it’s free. The second is GalaxIR a game for which I tried the “lite” version and got so hooked that I shelled out for the premium game right away. It’s a very simple real-time strategy game, a genre that I thought I had no patience for but which works here in bite-sized chunks. You start off on one planet and have to drag ships from there to conquer other worlds, which then start building your ships at a rate based on their “production” attribute. Of course, there are other players trying to do the same thing and it’s last one standing on the map. Games last a couple of minutes maximum, you can play both against other people and the AI in arcade or story modes, and it strikes a fantastic balance of twitch and strategy. And it’s marginally less addictive than cigarettes soaked in crack.
Books
We don’t talk enough about books anymore. But Bolt Thrower is here to change that. Recently, inspired by my discovery of Sherlock on the TV and my acquisition of a mobile phone with a screen big enough to use as an e-reader, I’ve been re-reading the Sherlock Holmes books. And why not? They’re free from Amazon or Project Gutenberg or iBooks and they’re damned great. I read them all before, probably 20 years or so ago, and I can still remember some of the plots. It’s also worth remembering that these were written nearly 150 years ago and yet the presentation of the stories and the chains of clues and deduction still feel fresh and modern today, a hallmark of how influential the style has been. What’s particularly striking, with the hindsight of having watched the TV drama, is how unpleasant Holmes himself is as a character. It’s never commented on in the stories, in which the characters unwaveringly demonstrate that constant outer politeness and stiff upper lip that’s such a hallmark of Victorian literary heroes, but reading between the lines you can suddenly see what an absolute uncaring, arrogant, rude, calculating-machine Holmes is. It’s part of the genius of the adaptation that the writers spotted this and bought it out to the open for the 21st century.
I also recently finished a translation of one of the Norse sagas, Egil’s Saga. I’ve read a fair amount of original myth and legend and I have to say that much of it doesn’t update well to the modern ear. It tends to be turgid stuff, featuring characters and social rules that appear remote and alien and a focus on ritual and geography over story. But Egil’s Saga is very different. Not only is it eminently readable and exciting but the titular character is a bizarre mix of beauty and beast: a skillful poet and patient farmer on the one hand but with a taste for violent raiding and a literally murderous temper on the other. When you’re so used to cardboard cut-out heroes and heroines in stories of this type, a character as complex as Egil takes some getting used to, but ultimately really helps power the tension and believability of the story. As a bonus, seeing as it’s an actual historical document, you get a cool history lesson on Viking culture into the bargain.
Films
Are you serious? What with working, family time, playing games, writing columns and reading books, you really expect me to find an opportunity to sit down and watch two solid hours of something? What do you think I am, a being of pure time?
Music
It struck me recently that in my music collection, there’s virtually nothing released between 2006 and 2009. That’s because those were years after my eldest girl was born and I was in a job where I couldn’t listen to music at work, so I didn’t listen to anything at all. When I got the opportunity to get the earphone back on a couple of years ago I obviously had plenty of old favourites to enjoy again after a long absence. But in terms of new music I knew nothing, nothing at all. Until one day, on twitter, a woman I’d never met and only started following on the basis that she worked at another tech company in the local area, mentioned that she had a hangover and was going to calm it down by listening to Mumford & Sons. Not feeling too great that day myself, I thought I’d take a listen on Spotify and whilst I was not - and am still not - sure that their particular brand of foot-stomping alternative bluegrass is particularly good for hangover, I was instantly hooked on the music. The woman was @oh_cat and she’d inadvertently tuned in me to the relatively new indie folk movement.
Since indie and folk made up the staple of my pre-2006 listening, I was all over this stuff like a rash. At first they look like fairly ill-matched bedfellows in terms of genre, but after hearing a whole lot of it, I’m left wondering why no-one tried this heaven-sent match before. Much of it is whimsical, delicate stuff with a clear link to the protest singer-songwriters of the 60’s, the sort of thing Micheal Barnes probably hates, but with the self-conscious lyrics and more complex melodic structures of alternative rock. The scene has a lot of names: indie folk, freak folk, nu-folk and many others but nowadays it makes up the bulk of my airtime. So I compiled a list of thirty of my favourite tracks, all by different artists, some of whom I found after recommendations from other F:AT users. It’s intended to be a sampler - find a track you like and listen to some more of their material - so skip what you don’t like and try to make it to the end. I couldn’t help but to pick a starting track that opens with the lyrics “This is the fortress that I have built”.
